What I Mean When I Talk About Whiteness.

What is whiteness? Honestly, it’s hard to pin down. For most of my life as a white person in the U.S., the goal was to not even notice it. That was part of the “lesson” I absorbed without knowing — learn how to look away.

Photo by ÉMILE SÉGUIN ✳️✳️✳️ on Unsplash

So when I try to define whiteness now, the words don’t come easily. What I do know is this — whiteness doesn’t define me, or any one white person. It isn’t my essence. But it is powerful. It’s a social construct with real, daily consequences. It’s culture. It’s a way of being. It’s a web of expectations, practices, and beliefs that we’ve all been impacted by — whether we notice it or not.

Even though whiteness isn’t who I am, it still gets shapes me. It influences how I think, how I move through the world, how I relate to others. Some days, it feels so familiar that I confuse it with being “just me.” And that’s the tricky part — whiteness works best when it goes unnoticed.

Here’s something I keep learning — whiteness isn’t neutral. It was built on purpose, to create and protect a system of power where value was assigned to some lives over others. It fuels racism. It keeps inequity in place. And honestly, it gets in the way of me living into the kind of person I want to be — the kind of parent, partner, and neighbor I hope to become.

Not long ago, my multiracial faith community held a worship night created for people of color. Right away I knew — this wasn’t something for me to attend as a white person. It wasn’t about me. It was about making space for healing, belonging, and connection in a world that too often denies that space.

I was proud of my community for doing this. I was excited my black husband and brown kids could be there. I felt a deep “yes” in me — this is what living our values looks like.

And yet… alongside the excitement, I felt something else—sadness.

That feeling caught me off guard. Why sadness, if I so fully agreed with the event? If I wanted my loved ones to go? If I longed for communities that live their values like this?

That’s when I recognized an old companion — whiteness.

Whiteness whispered: You’re being left out. This isn’t fair. You’re supposed to be included everywhere. It tried to convince me the sadness was about exclusion, about something being taken from me.

But here’s the truth — I wasn’t excluded at all. My community welcomes me deeply. What was happening was that I was being invited to participate in a different way. Not at the center. Not as the one taking up space. But as someone learning how to honor and create space for others.

That sadness wasn’t about the event. It was about whiteness and the grip it’s had on me.

And strangely, that realization felt freeing. I could feel how this community was offering me something far better than the belonging whiteness promises. A belonging rooted not in dominance, but in abundance. In love. In possibility.

I still feel sadness when I think about whiteness — because it causes so much harm. To my family. To people I love. To whole communities who have to fight every day against its weight. Sadness feels right. Sometimes rage does too.

But alongside those feelings, I’m learning something important — whiteness doesn’t have the final say about who I am. It’s not the sum of me. It’s a system. A set of practices. A story. And like all stories, it can be questioned. It can be resisted. It can be rewritten.

Every time I notice how whiteness tries to shape me, I get a little more room to breathe. To choose differently. To imagine who I might be without it running the show.

And maybe that’s the work in front of me — to keep loosening whiteness’s hold, to practice another way of being, and to invite others to wonder with me — what could open up for us if whiteness wasn’t the script we lived by?