Not All White People… But it’s Always White People

I try to stay away from the words always and never. I'm not all-knowing. There's no way I can parse out what will always or never be the case. Language matters.

And here's the caveat I need to offer before we go any further — when it comes to my brown kids or my Black partner and protecting them — it's always white people who feel the most unsafe.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

I also want to share this hope, that white folks can truly hear this and sit with it. I’m coming to you as a fellow white person — a parent, a partner — appealing to you to pause and think about this. To honestly look at what part we white folks play in making the world less safe for people of color.

Because I can unequivocally say that it's white people — people who look like me — who feel the most risky to my multiracial family. I've sat with that truth long enough now that I can say it clearly, even if it makes some people uncomfortable.

This isn’t me broadly condemning all white people in the name of some false idea of safety. It isn’t me trying to provoke or shame anyone. It’s simply the real risk assessment we make every day as a multiracial family living in the U.S.

Part of why I say this comes from lived experience with my family.

White people have most often been the ones to dismiss what my partner and kids say about what feels safe or unsafe. The ones most likely to tell us we’re exaggerating, misunderstanding, or being too sensitive — even after hearing about direct experiences of racism, hostility, or danger. It’s white folks whose ideas about safety most often directly contradict our lived reality.

It's white people who struggle most to empathize with, or even believe, the lived experiences of my Black partner and brown kids. Who can't seem to trust that they were mistreated, or that their worth was questioned, because of the color of their skin. Who seem unconcerned when the rights and freedoms of people of color are stripped away. Who seem readily capable of separating themselves from the humanity of people who don't look like them.

And part of why I say this is rooted in my own learning as a white person in this country.

The whiteness I was taught — and have witnessed again and again — carries within it the othering and dehumanizing of people of color. It shapes how we white folks connect with one another. How we seem to define our worth, our story, our identity, and our place in U.S. culture in contrast to those who aren't white.

Let me slow down here. I sense what some white readers might be reaching for right now. There's an urge — I've seen it many times — to redirect a conversation like this toward Black on Black crime. What about the danger to Black and brown people from Black people?

So to anyone itching to shift the subject — I'm going to invite you to stop, breathe, and please stay with me.

Black and brown people are harmed by white people. That is documented, studied, and real. It is the history of the U.S. — why whiteness was created and written into our laws. Whiteness was a means of establishing psychological, social, and political distance between white people and Black people. And I’ve witnessed for myself how whiteness still functions that way today.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting data, the majority of violent crimes are intraracial — meaning people are most often harmed by someone of the same race. That’s true across racial groups, including white people. But when we look specifically at hate crimes — crimes motivated by bias around race, ethnicity, religion, national origin — the FBI consistently documents that the majority of known offenders are white.

The data is there. It's not hidden. And I see this most among white people — there seems to be a need to ignore how violent we are. How violent whiteness has been and continues to be.

So when I say it's always white people I fear most for my family — that fear is not irrational. It's not born of ignorance or sweeping generalization. It comes from stories. From moments I can't unfeel. From patterns I've watched repeat themselves too many times to dismiss.

It lives in my body because it has been learned through experience — through loving people whose skin color makes them a target of suspicion, hostility, and dehumanization. And through being white myself. Through everything I absorbed simply by being included in whiteness — the messages, the assumptions, the permission slips I didn't even know I was collecting. It has taken real, ongoing effort to unlearn. I'm still unlearning. That fear is reinforced by history, by data, and by the reality my family continues to live.

The fear also comes from watching how readily white folks — including powerful ones — turn to dehumanizing language when talking about people of color. And I don't say that from the outside looking in. I say it as someone who learned how to do this.

Not the slurs. Not the obvious stuff. The subtler version — the way I was taught, without anyone ever sitting me down and teaching me, to see Black and brown people as other. As less familiar. As something to be cautious about or quietly discounted. That learning was so woven into the air I breathed growing up that I didn't even know I was breathing it.

And when I hear white folks use dehumanizing language today, I recognize it. I recognize the soil it grows in. That language is always communicating something.

It says they are comfortable, or at least unwilling to examine, how that kind of rhetoric helps create and sustain a world where people of color remain unsafe. I know, because I had to choose to examine it in myself. And that choice — that work — is one white people can make. Which means the ones who aren't making it are choosing that too.

This is not abstract, and it is not ancient history.

In 1996, then-First Lady Hillary Clinton described Black youth as "super predators" with "no conscience, no empathy" who needed to be "brought to heel." She later apologized. But that language — used by a powerful white woman to describe Black children — helped justify the mass incarceration policies that devastated Black communities for decades.

In 2018, Trump sat down with senators and called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries” — then asked why the U.S. couldn’t bring in more people from Norway instead. Norway, a country that is overwhelmingly white. He confirmed those words himself in December 2025, and went further — describing Somalia as “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” That same year, he tweeted that immigrants would “pour into and infest our Country.” In 2019, he described Baltimore — a majority-Black American city where real people live, love, and raise their families — as a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” 

That same year, he told four sitting U.S. Congresswomen of color — three of them born right here in the United States — to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Three American women. Told to go back to where they came from.

Donald Trump has repeatedly — and without apology — used language about immigrants and people of color that critics, historians, and civil rights groups describe as dehumanizing and echoing ethnic-nationalist rhetoric — referring to immigrants as “animals,” “vermin,” an “invasion,” and even claiming they are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

This is a pattern. The concern isn’t about political disagreement. It’s about how language like this has historically been used to create fear, justify exclusion, and distance people from one another’s humanity.

Gregory Stanton, founding president of Genocide Watch , identifies dehumanization as Stage Four in the process that can lead to mass violence. In his “Ten Stages of Genocide” framework, he notes that targeted groups are often compared to “animals, vermin, insects, or diseases” in ways that reduce empathy and normalize harm. Susan Benesch, a human rights lawyer, founder of the Dangerous Speech Project, and researcher affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, has documented how this language works: it lowers the moral and psychological barriers that usually stop people from condoning violence.

When white people hear language like this — from presidents, from first ladies, from news anchors, from neighbors — and say nothing, share it, or defend it as "just politics," they become part of what that language does. It spreads. It normalizes. It gives permission. That's what the research shows.

I've written before about dehumanizing language spoken directly to me by other white people when referring to people of color — you can read about a few of those moments here and here and here.

I think about those moments often. The ones that still trigger an intense, full-body fear when I let myself really sit with them. Fear over how my partner’s skin color — how my children’s skin color — can make them targets of longstanding suspicion and hate. Every memory, every story, every moment that surfaces seems anchored in the same truth — it’s white people I fear most when it comes to protecting them.

And that fear is growing.

Whiteness — as an ideology, as a power structure, as a way of organizing and understanding human beings in the U.S.— seems to be something more and more white people around me feel the need to cling to right now. There's a visible, growing urgency to tie safety, belonging, human worth, identity, and story to the old ways whiteness has always operated. And by "old ways," I mean the ways that have never actually included everyone. The ways that were always built on someone else's exclusion.

What makes this even more painful is watching it happen among white people I know personally. People who have said they care about equity. People who have sat at my table. People who say they love us.

I’m seeing more and more moments where Black and brown people are dehumanized by white people who know my multiracial family. Moments where white people seem to forget what they claim to value. Forget who they claim to love.

Where bias and hatred sneak out through memes, offhand comments, talking points, and rehearsed arguments that sound like they were practiced in spaces where nobody pushed back. In rooms full of other white people who maybe didn't know how to name what they were hearing, or who did know and said nothing. That silence is its own kind of answer.

It's always white people I most fear because our hate — when it hardens into policy, when it gets organized, when it finds a home in political power — has the capacity to become law. The fear and dehumanization that individual white people carry doesn't stay individual for long in this country. It finds expression in the policies of administrations.

And what breaks my heart, over and over, is this: so many white people who dehumanize Black and brown folks seem to believe that our shared whiteness — theirs and mine — is supposed to override everything.

My love for my partner. My love for my kids. My commitment to our neighbors of color, to our community, to a basic human belief that everyone deserves safety, belonging, and dignity. They seem to think whiteness is a loyalty that should come first.

Not all white people do this. I know that. But when the harm comes — and it comes — it is almost always white people doing it. And I also believe we white folks are capable of something different.

We are capable of telling the truth about the harm whiteness has caused. We are capable of listening when we’ve caused harm, of recognizing the moments we’ve chosen whiteness over relationship. We are capable of choosing connection over hierarchy, humanity over fear, accountability over silence, and repair over what feels familiar.

That’s my hope in writing this. Not to push white people away, but to call us closer — closer to the people we love, closer to our own humanity, closer to the kind of world where my family, and every family, can move through life with more safety, dignity, and belonging. I believe that kind of change is possible.