The Question I Can’t Ignore: How Does Whiteness Still Shape Violence, Division, and What We Call Safety?

At the start of a new year, I notice my questions shifting.

Photo by Buddha Elemental 3D on Unsplash

They’re less about what I want to accomplish and more about what I’m already part of—sometimes without choosing, and often without fully seeing it. Less about fixing myself alone. More about how we’re living together, and what our ordinary, everyday lives are helping to create.

One question keeps returning—even when I try to set it down:

What do division, violence, and “safety” today have to do with whiteness?

When I say whiteness, I’m not talking about skin color. I’m not making a judgment about whether individual white people are good or bad. I’m talking about whiteness as a system—a set of rules, beliefs, habits, and stories that were built to decide who belongs, who is protected, and who holds power.

Historians and educators agree on this much—whiteness was created. It did not always exist. It was invented alongside colonization and slavery as a way to divide people and secure land, wealth, and control. It wasn’t about shared culture or values. It was a political tool—a line drawn to between people who might otherwise have stood together to resist exploitation.

And it wasn’t just an idea floating around. It was written into law.

From the very beginning of the U.S., laws were crafted to benefit people considered white. Citizenship was limited to “free white persons.” Enslaved people were treated as property. Indigenous people were forcibly removed from their land through violence and policy. These decisions shaped who could own land, who could vote, who could move freely, and who would be protected by the state—and who could be harmed with little consequence.

Violence wasn’t a side effect of this system. Violence was central to it.

Enslavement, land theft, lynching, forced removal, policing, and imprisonment were all used to enforce racial order. Whiteness stayed in place through fear and force.

But it also worked by offering a deal.

Some people—pale folks—were offered access, opportunity, and a sense of protection. The message was pervasive and constant to those would were counted as white: “ At least you’re not them. At least you belong here. At least you’re safer.”

This deal seemed to teach white people to look for safety in distance, comparison, and dominance instead of shared care. It trained us to protect our spot rather than question the system. Fear replaced solidarity. A thin sense of safety for some replaced the possibility of real safety for everyone.

And that story didn’t end in the past.

It’s still being told.

We see it in political messaging, advertising, and government imagery. We see it in the series of images below tweeted by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2025, later collected by Geoff Bowser and reported on by Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times.

The images are striking in their sameness: confident, clean-cut white men standing in front of factories, cranes, flags, and wide-open land. The slogans read things like Americans First, Your Nation Needs You, Build America’s Future.

The message isn’t subtle nor it is new. This is who belongs. This is who leads. This is who the future is for. They tell us whiteness is the symbol of the nation’s success.

If that kind of imagery feels familiar—or even reassuring—it’s not accidental. Whiteness was designed to feel comforting to those it centers. Many of us were raised on its promise—work hard, follow the rules, stay loyal, and you’ll be safe.

And often, that promise seems to hold—at least for a while.

When white people fall in line, stay quiet, or look away, whiteness tends to reward us with access, belonging, and a sense of security. When we question, resist, or get in the way, whiteness can turn on us too. Because at its core, whiteness isn’t about people. It’s about control.

This is where the promise starts to crack.

Whiteness claims to offer safety, but it depends on fear—fear of losing status, fear of being replaced, fear of being blamed, fear of falling out of line. It teaches white people to look for threats instead of connection. To protect systems instead of people. To justify violence when comfort or control feels at risk.

Those ideas don’t just divide us. They wear us down.

Living inside them keeps many white people anxious and defensive, constantly trying to prove we deserve what we have. Whiteness promises belonging, but often delivers isolation. It promises security, but leaves many of us disconnected—from one another and from ourselves.

That’s not because we’re failing. It’s because we’re living inside a system designed to keep us competing rather than caring, striving rather than relating. A system that values power over human life. And when any group can be treated as disposable, when systems matter more than people, when only some fears and needs are seen as legitimate, none of us are truly safe.

We can see this in immigration enforcement today. ICE overwhelmingly targets black and brown people communities, reinforcing the message—echoed in those Department of Labor images—that this country is for white people. Reporting and government data show that many people detained by ICE have no criminal convictions, despite claims by the Trump administration that enforcement focuses on “dangerous criminals.” Militarized tactics traumatize entire communities. Families are torn apart. People live with constant fear. This is violence carried out in the name of “safety.”

And it’s not just about immigration.

It’s about how systems shaped by whiteness decide who looks suspicious, who is disposable, and whose rights are easiest to violate.

We saw similar logic at work on January 6, 2021. Court records show the people who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol were overwhelmingly white. Many believed that something had been taken from them—and that violence was justified to take it back. That belief didn’t come out of nowhere. U.S. history has repeatedly taught white people that intimidation and force are acceptable when dominance, status, or even comfort feels threatened.

And then there was Minneapolis last week.

On January 7, 2026, a federal ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen—a mother, a spouse, a poet, a neighbor, a white woman. She wasn’t the target of an arrest. She wasn’t blocking agents—video footage shows vehicles driving around her. Her death raised serious questions and sparked grief across the city and the nation.

For many white people, this moment might feel particularly unsettling. It stripped away a belief that a lot of us rely on—systems built on force and fear are only dangerous for people of color. But they can turn on white people too—especially when we question, resist, or simply show up. When institutions use force first and care last, everyone becomes vulnerable.

None of this is about shame. It’s about telling the truth.

Whiteness was built through violence. It’s maintained through division. And it promises safety by producing fear and isolation.

I know many white people today who are genuinely longing for belonging, worth, and security. That longing is real. But whiteness offers false answers. It tells us safety comes from dominance. That identity comes from separation. That worth comes from being above someone else.

Those lies keep us divided. Those lies sustain harm.

When we start to question them—when we can get curious instead of defensive—we don’t lose. We get closer to our humanity. We make room for relationships that aren’t built on fear or comparison. For communities where safety comes from people showing up for one another. For lives that feel more honest, more connected, and more whole.

This doesn’t mean pretending harm hasn’t happened. And it doesn’t mean rushing toward easy unity. It means facing what we inherited and choosing, again and again, to build something better.

What whiteness offers is narrow. What it promises is fragile. What it delivers is division, violence, inequity, and insecurity.

What’s possible beyond it—care, accountability, dignity, shared safety—asks something of us. But it gives more back than it takes.

I can’t promise this path is simple. But I can say this: I’ve found people rarely regret becoming more honest, more connected, and more whole.

Yes, there are other systems shaping our lives—capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexualism—that also determine who matters and who gets to set the rules. But whiteness is the throughline that sits closest to my own social position, and to the harm I can most directly help to disrupt.

That feels like a good place to begin.