I'm Sick of Hearing About Whiteness
If you’ve been hearing a lot about whiteness lately, maybe you’re tired of it.
Maybe someone talks about how bad whiteness is, and your first thought is: Not all white people. Or: I’m tired of hearing about how terrible white people are. Or: I can’t help that I’m white.
Maybe you think that whiteness isn’t even a real thing. Maybe you want to tell people—or you already have—that they shouldn’t be talking about it. Maybe you’ve said, out loud or in a comment online: No one talks about Blackness in this same way…
I hear you. And I'm going to ask you to stick with me for a few more paragraphs anyway. Because I don't think those reactions are meaningless or random.
Maybe you feel something toward me—another white person—for bringing up whiteness right now. That I’m someone stoking division. That I’ve got some deep self hatred going on. That I’m delusional, making stuff up. Brainwashed. Woke. Someone not worth believing.
I don't think those kinds of reactions are going to just fade because we ignore them—any more than people are going to stop talking about whiteness because it makes some of us feel some kind of way. So maybe, since it’s unavoidable, we just face it. Together.
I’m saying this as a white person who grew up in the U.S. and I’m not trying to make you feel or think any particular way. For most of my life, any mention of whiteness—white people, white skin, sometimes even just the word race, any of it—made me feel some kind of way. And that kind of way was never good. Or even neutral.
I got defensive. I felt accused. Sometimes ashamed. Sometimes guilty. Sometimes afraid, or angry. Sometimes I still feel these things.
Not because anyone told me I’d personally done something wrong. Not even because someone was pointing a finger at me specifically. I just knew whiteness was not something I wanted to talk or think about.
Something about it felt off—wrong to be attached to. But I didn't know how to say that, or even really let myself think it. I didn't have the imagination or the curiosity to ask what my relationship with whiteness even was. I just had a whole lot of discomfort, with nowhere to put it.
Eventually I tried talking about it. That went badly. The other white people in my life didn't want to go there either—if anything they seemed even more distressed, uncomfortable, unsure of themselves at the mere mention of whiteness. And I didn’t want to unload my struggle with it onto the people of color in my life. From everything they'd already shared with me about their own experiences, I sensed—and some folks directly said—they'd had more than enough of whiteness to last several lifetimes.
The thing is, now I see that my reactions to whiteness make sense when I actually look at it closely. Whiteness is maddening. I mean that—it’s irrational. It doesn't hold together logically. And yet we’re all expected to act as if it does, while somehow never really being allowed to look at it too closely or question it. Once I started looking at it anyway, a lot of my own confusion and unease started to make sense.
Think about it: whiteness lumps together people from entirely different countries, cultures, languages, and histories, and calls them one people. On the basis of what? Skin that's roughly similar in shade. A few physical traits that might be alike. That's it. That's the whole unifying principle.
That feels really strange, when I actually sit with it.
And the part that unsettles me even more—whiteness isn't even stable. Humans built this category, and then had to build other categories just to define who's outside of it. Who counts as white has shifted over time and by place. That alone tells me it was never really about skin color—it can’t have been.
Entire groups of people have moved in and out of whiteness depending on the era. Pale skin has never been an automatic ticket in. And it's never been a guarantee you get to stay.
To me, that’s wild. You're told you belong to whiteness simply because of your skin—and the terms of that belonging keep changing. That is unsettling. That is maddening. Confusing. Maybe even frightening.
Whiteness is shifty. It’s not something you can count on.
That's why, for me, trying to build an identity and a sense of belonging in whiteness—which is what I was taught to do for most of my life—has felt like trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense. It's not that hearing about whiteness upset me. It's that whiteness itself was the source of the unease all along. The shame, the guilt, the defensiveness, the helplessness—that wasn't what people were doing to me by naming whiteness. That was what whiteness was doing to me, and had been doing to me the whole time.
Whiteness told me: you belong here, these are your people, simply because of your skin. But that belonging was never free. It came with terms. Loyalty. Silence. Lies. Pieces of myself I had to give up, or distort, to stay inside its lines. Terms I usually only learned about the moment I broke one of them.
I think I understand why "not all white people” is so frequently a response. For me, it was like self-preservation—a way to step outside the discomfort before it could land on me. An attempt to communicate that I don’t agree with the sort of belonging whiteness offers. That I’d like to become something other than what it says I have to be. That I’m looking for different kind of belonging altogether.
Because whiteness isn’t the only thing available to us. I don’t think it’s ever been the best thing. And every day, I’m more convinced that there’s something better. I’m not exactly sure what that looks like. But I’m fairly sure the reaction so many of us white folks have to even hearing about whiteness could be a clue that whiteness really isn’t working for any of us.
So, here's what I'd like to offer—because I think we deserve something more useful than a reflex.
We can get curious about the discomfort instead of defending against it. Next time we feel a tightness—that urge to say not me or not us—maybe we try pausing there. Maybe we ask: what am I protecting right now? What might I be admitting if I didn't defend it?
We can separate our personhood from the system, without exempting ourselves from examination, accountability, and action. Whiteness impacts white people, just like it impacts everyone else. When folks talk about whiteness, I’ve found they're usually not talking about me as an individual, or any other one white person. They're talking about something bigger. A system that predates us and will outlast us—unless we do something about it. We didn't invent it. But we did inherit it, and we do have a relationship to it, whether we've examined that relationship or not.
We can ask what whiteness has cost us. What has it cost all of us in the U.S.? What have we given up, distorted, or numbed in ourselves to stay inside the lines whiteness draws? For me, it was honesty. Connection. Freedom. The ability to sit in a hard conversation without needing to escape it. Who we could become as a society. What equity could look like. Whiteness shrank the range of what I let myself imagine was possible—for all of us.
We can let the tiredness be a signal, not a stopping point. If we're exhausted or upset just from hearing about whiteness, imagine what it might be to live inside a system built by it—to live inside a system that was built to keep you out. Every single day, not just when it comes up in conversation. Our tiredness is real. Our discomfort is real. And I’ve found it's nowhere near the whole story.
We don't have to have this figured out today. I don’t think anyone expects us to. I certainly don't. But we can start by refusing to view ourselves as exempt from the conversation. And by getting more curious about why the conversation, or maybe even just the word whiteness, touches something in us at all.
If you want to go deeper…
I'm not the only one thinking, talking, and writing about whiteness. Not even close. Here are a few places to start if you want to understand where whiteness came from, what it was built to do, and how such a wide range of people ended up grouped under one label. Maybe something here can help us move toward a relationship with whiteness that doesn’t leave us stuck, or just feeling bad.
On the history and invention of whiteness:
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter — traces whiteness as an evolving idea, not a biological fact, from ancient Europe through the modern U.S., shaped by science, art, and politics rather than anything inherent in skin.
The Wages of Whiteness by David R. Roediger — on how whiteness took shape in the U.S. working class, offering a kind of psychological and social payoff in place of economic solidarity across race lines.
How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev — a close look at how one group not originally considered "white" in the U.S. was absorbed into whiteness over time, and what that tells us about the category's shifting boundaries.
White by Law by Ian Haney López — examines how U.S. courts literally had to define, again and again, who counted as white—showing that the category was constructed, contested, and enforced through law.
On whiteness as a lived, ongoing system:
White Poverty by Rev. William J. Barber II — challenges the myth that poverty is primarily about individual failure or racial difference, and shows how economic and racial divisions have been used to maintain unequal systems. It can help us understand whiteness by exploring how race can divide people who might otherwise find common ground in working together for economic and racial justice.
White Rage by Carol Anderson — traces how white resistance to Black progress has repeatedly shaped U.S. history, arguing that racial inequity persists into the present not because of individual prejudice alone but from political and institutional efforts to repeatedly restrict Black freedom, rights, and power.
White Women, Race Matters by Ruth Frankenberg — an early work in "whiteness studies," looking at how white women specifically experience and enact racial identity, often without naming it as such.
The Science of Racism by Keon West — a methodical, evidence-based look at how racism operates, how it affects people, and how it shows up in systems and everyday interactions—a way of understanding whiteness not as individual beliefs or intentions, but as a set of social patterns, assumptions, and advantages.
"Whiteness as Property," a 1993 law review article by Cheryl I. Harris — argues that whiteness itself has functioned legally and socially like a form of property, conferring rights and protections.
For personal reflection and starting the path to freedom:
Waking Up White by Debby Irving
White Like Me by Tim Wise
The Heart of Whiteness by Robert Jensen
Our Problem, Our Path by Ali Michael and Eleonora Bartoli
What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri
Nice White Ladies by Jessie Daniels
A Race is a Nice Thing to Have by Janet E. Helms
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