What If Whiteness Ended, But We—White People—Didn’t?

I just finished reading a novel. I won’t tell you the title—I don’t want to spoil it. But in the very first pages, every white person dies. Not from a violent act or some grand revenge. They simply couldn’t live in a world where whiteness no longer existed. So when whiteness died, they did too.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

It might sound strange, but I found the idea hopeful. I like the idea of whiteness not being permanent.

I can already hear a response I’ve gotten before: “You’re a white person, if you’re against whiteness, you must hate yourself.” But that’s not how I see it. I’m not whiteness.

Yes, whiteness has shaped me, but it doesn’t need to continue to define me. I’m made up of many things. I don’t need whiteness to be human. I don’t need whiteness to be me.

The thought of a world without whiteness—and without all the systems that sort us and limit us—feels like freedom to me. I’d love to see patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, all the ways we divide, define, and devalue each other, finally lose their grip. Whiteness is simply the one I feel I know most personally—the one that most gets in my way when I’m trying to live out my values and show up how I want to. The one that makes it hard to be the kind of whole and healed person I’m trying to become.

There’s so much pain and harm wrapped up in whiteness. So much control and fear and dehumanizing of people. It teaches us that skin color decides human worth. It shapes the priorities of our nation in the U.S. It keeps getting rebuilt and reinforced, again and again, by those who benefit from it or can’t imagine a world not run by it. But things are changing—whether whiteness is ready for it or not.

You might’ve heard that in about 20 years, around 2045, the U.S. won’t be mostly white anymore. There’s talk about how—for the first time since we started counting people by race—people of color will outnumber white folks. Maybe that explains some of the frantic energy and tension we’re seeing. Maybe the tight grip on whiteness is really a deep fear of shifting ground—a fear of not knowing how to live in a world that looks different than the one whiteness created.

I think a lot of white people can sense change coming. Maybe it’s already harder to keep the all-white spaces that once felt “normal”—the churches, workplaces, neighborhoods, friend groups, schools. Maybe what’s really happening is this—whiteness hasn’t prepared us white folks for a world without it—the kind of world that seems to be emerging right before our eyes. It hasn’t taught us how to imagine different ways to live, ways that might actually make us more human—more connected, more free.

So no — I don’t believe white people have to disappear for whiteness to end. Pale, melanin-lacking skin isn’t the problem. Whiteness is. And whiteness is something we made up. If humans built it, that means we can take it apart too.

That’s where I find hope. We can separate who we are from the system that shaped us. We can rebuild our sense of self on something kinder, more honest, more gentle, more whole, more equitable, more free. We can live in a world without whiteness. I believe we can help create it.

Whiteness—the ideas, the fear, the way it teaches us to live—doesn’t help us adapt to what’s ahead. It can’t lead us into the future. It keeps us small. It keeps us scared. It keeps us isolated.

Maybe the real question isn’t what would end if whiteness were gone—but what might finally begin. A world where everyone—white folks included—has space to be whole. That doesn’t feel like an end to me. It sounds like the start of something more human than what we’ve known.

That’s what I’m working toward. Not the end of people—just the end of whatever keeps us stuck and small. The end of systems that pull us away from our own humanity and make us deny it in others. The stuff that tells us we have to shrink or change just to be seen, to be worthy of care.

And I wonder—what kind of world could we build if we actually let whiteness come to an end?