We Can't Dehumanize Our Way to Equity

“I’m so tired of white people.”

Photo by ostudio on Unsplash

Another white person said this to me recently. I've said versions of it too. But every time I hear it, I hesitate. Something about this way of thinking doesn't sit right with me.

I think I understand what could be underneath it. Exhaustion. Confusion. Anger. Fear. A desire to name real harm.

But something important can happen when we stop talking about whiteness as the problem and start talking about people as the problem. Something that only lives in those people over there, rather than something larger that impacts all of us.

They become the problem. Those white people. Those voters. Those families.

And once the problem gets located inside another person's identity, something can shift. I've seen it in myself. The intention and energy that could go toward understanding and taking apart the larger system starts flowing somewhere else — solely toward the people we've named as the problem.

And that redirect is enticing, because it can feel like action. But I've come to think it's also one of the most effective distractions whiteness has going for it.

Because here's something I've thought a lot about: whiteness doesn't need white supremacists to survive. It doesn't need active defenders or true believers to keep its structures standing.

It does need us to stay out of its way. To stay distracted. To leave the systems, stories, and tools in place and unexamined. Whiteness is remarkably good at generating exactly that kind of distraction — and I think directing our energy toward attacking other white people is one of the ways it does it. It keeps us busy. It keeps us feeling righteous. And it keeps the actual architecture of the thing largely untouched.

We don’t end up asking how we all got here. We don’t look at what stories, systems, fears, and conditions shaped this reality. Instead, we get consumed by blaming, shaming, defeating, or distancing ourselves from problematic people. We stop examining the larger forces at work and spend our time morally sorting humans into categories.

Good people. Bad people. Ignorant people. Disposable people.

And I don't think that gets us very far. Because if certain people are the problem, then solving the problem starts to look like getting rid of those people.

Maybe not always literally. Sometimes it looks like cutting people off, writing them off, dismissing or humiliating them — dehumanizing them just enough that we no longer have to stay connected to their humanity.

But the underlying logic remains: some people are the obstacle, and the world would be better without them in the way. And that reasoning is deeply familiar to me as a white person in the U.S. Because whiteness taught me those tools.

Not always directly. Often through culture, silence, reward, fear, and belonging. I learned how to other people. How to protect comfort and power through exclusion. How to reduce people rather than get curious about the systems shaping all of us.

There's a quote from Audre Lorde I keep coming back to: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." What I take from her words is that the methods matter.

If I use dehumanization, contempt, and othering to fight dehumanization, contempt, and othering — what am I actually building? Even if I call it equity, I'm still relying on the same reasoning. The same tools. And underneath it all, I'm still leaving whiteness itself largely alone.

I don't think that leads us toward dignity or liberation.

Not because harm isn't real — it is. Not because accountability doesn't matter — it absolutely does. But because that logic is part of the very thing I say I want to dismantle. And because whiteness doesn't need me to defend it. It just needs me to stay focused on the wrong thing.

For me, this isn't about separating myself from "those white people." It's about understanding and dismantling whiteness itself — a violent system that shapes how belonging, safety, value, and power work in the U.S.

Because when I make it only about other people, I get pulled away from the deeper work I actually need to do. I start obsessing over what other people believe, whether they'll change, how angry I am, how wrong they are. And before long, all my energy is wrapped up in reacting to humans instead of examining and changing the larger system shaping all of us — including me. I stop noticing how whiteness lives in my own fears, habits, relationships, and ways of seeing the world. And while I'm busy doing that, the structures stay standing.

But when I shift my attention back to whiteness, different questions become possible:

How have I been shaped by this? What have I normalized? What am I protecting, and why does it matter to me? What would it look like to show up and relate differently?

Those questions are uncomfortable. But I think they move me closer to something real — and closer to actually doing something about the system itself, not just the people it's shaped.

I'm learning how to challenge harm without turning people into villains to be vanquished. To hold accountability without collapsing people into the worst things they believe or participate in. To put down the tools whiteness handed me, even when they feel effective in the moment.

Because attacking other white people doesn't dismantle whiteness. It just keeps us busy while the house stays standing.