What Whiteness Does…
- Jessica Kiragu
- Jul 12
- 7 min read
Whiteness feels especially heavy to me. It’s unsettling. Unsafe. This is coming from a white person in the U.S.
Maybe it’s because it feels so loud and proud right now. Or maybe it’s because I’ve started to better recognize the lies whiteness tells, the power it continues to wield. And now it’s hard to stop noticing.
I say this a lot because I think it’s worth repeating — when I say whiteness, I’m not talking about white skin or white people. I’m not talking about naming names and casting blame on individual white folks. This isn’t about self-hate or hatred of white people.
It’s bigger than that. I’m talking about the story the U.S. has told for centuries. A story built on lies about skin color and whose lives matter most, whose fear deserves protection, whose innocence is assumed, and whose humanity can be overlooked. Patterns and norms that help keep those lies and stories alive, and the effects of this on all of us.
Whiteness doesn’t just shape policies or institutions. It shapes us. It can shape what we notice, who we easily believe, who we empathize with, and who we hold responsible when something terrible happens.
This week, with that heaviness sitting in my chest, I found myself thinking about two Black men whose lives ended far too soon: Philando Castile and Nolan Wells.
Whenever I hear about another Black or brown person dying, and sense that race — especially whiteness — may be part of the story, my heart immediately goes to my Black partner and our biracial kids. I think about how many white people who love them struggle to see that race puts them at risk. That whiteness can be dangerous.
That this isn’t hyperbole or exaggeration. It’s lived experience. It’s woven throughout U.S. history. It continues today, and too often we’ve seen it go unnamed and unchallenged.
I also found myself reflecting on what whiteness taught me. How it has influenced the way I — and other white folks in my life — respond when we witness another person’s tragedy, especially when that person doesn’t share our race. How whiteness has warped my sense of connection and humanity. And how that isn’t the person I want to be.
Let me get back to what brought all of this to the surface for me this week.
Ten years ago in Minnesota, on July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop after telling the officer he was legally carrying a firearm. His partner, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter, both Black, were in the car. That little girl watched it happen. Diamond watched the man she loved struggle and bleed beside her.
Diamond livestreamed the aftermath on Facebook. The video doesn’t just capture Philando bleeding and suffering. It captures what came next. Diamond being handcuffed. She and her four-year-old child being placed in the back of a police vehicle. You can watch the moment Diamond’s remarkable calm finally gives way to the shock and grief of what has just happened. And then there’s the voice of her little girl, trying to comfort her mom, “I don’t want you to get shooted.”
As I watched Philando’s mother speak this week about her son — his kindness, his generosity, his humanity — I couldn’t stop thinking about my own family.
I thought about what safety means for our multiracial family in the U.S. I thought about how quickly an ordinary day can become someone’s worst nightmare. How easily life can be taken. And how whiteness contributes to that reality.
I’m not alone in that. After Philando was killed, then-Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton said he believed the shooting would not have happened if the people in the car had been white. I remember hearing those words back then. I still think about and agree with them today.
As I remembered Philando, Diamond, and that tiny girl sitting in the back seat, I noticed something else.
I remembered the patterns I was taught growing up. The ones I learned from whiteness. Patterns that encouraged me to ask what Philando did wrong before I fully grieved what had been done to him. To Diamond. To a small child, just along for the ride.
He had a gun. Did he follow the officer’s instructions? What happened in those few moments before the livestream began? What did Philando do?
Those questions feel familiar because I’ve heard versions of them for most of my life. I used to ask them too. When I sit with this sort of questioning today, after the loss of another Black or brown person in the U.S., I feel how incredibly heartless they are. I can better see the barriers whiteness helped me put up between myself and other people, between myself and my own humanity.
Now I find myself wondering where my kindness went. Where my care for another human being or my heart for a small child went. Where my own humanity went. How could they be so easily pushed aside? And for what?
It’s what whiteness did to me.
It taught me to search for explanations before I sat with someone else’s pain. It taught me to understand the fear of the person with power before I understood the terror of the Black person whose life had been taken. It taught me to imagine myself standing beside the police officer — the symbol of authority and safety — instead of beside the family forever changed by his actions.
Then, this week, I found myself reading about another young Black person whose life ended far too soon: eighteen-year-old Nolan Wells.
His parents are now grieving a child they loved deeply. Reports say Nolan became separated from the group of white friends he was with on Horn Island off the coast of Mississippi. His friends returned safely to the mainland. Nolan’s body was later found on July 6, 2026. His family confirmed his death, and the investigation into what happened is ongoing.
As I followed the story, I noticed something familiar. Almost immediately, some people started looking for ways Nolan might somehow be responsible for what happened to him.
He chose to stay. He was interested in a girl. He left his phone on the boat. He should have…
Again, I recognized something I had learned from whiteness.
Look for the mistake. Find the poor choice. Listen to the white people — take them at their word. Look for an explanation for how the Black or brown person who died is at least partly responsible for their own death.
It lessens the grief. It protects the belief that the world is basically fair — that race isn’t really shaping what happened. It allows me to stay connected to the people and systems with power while creating distance from the people who have been harmed. It allows whiteness to remain unnamed and unchanged.
I also found myself looking at the photos of Nolan surrounded by his white friends.
I could feel how growing up white taught me to extend understanding toward those young white faces. How young they are. How young people sometimes make decisions they later regret. How easily I can see myself in them. How I'd want grace for them — just like I’d want it for myself.
Whiteness hadn’t taught me to extend that same grace to Nolan. It had taught me to look first for reasons he should have known better.
Whiteness hadn’t prepared me to question what it might have felt like to be the only Black person in that very white space. Or even notice how most — if not all — of the other people in the images from the island that day were white. Or to question how different the public conversation might sound today if the situation had been reversed — if a group of Black teenagers had returned home without their white friend, and his family later reported that his phone had been returned with messages deleted while it was in the friends’ possession.
Whiteness taught me — and still pressures me — to stand with white innocence. To deny, ignore, defend against, or explain away the harm embedded within whiteness itself. To disconnect what happened to Nolan from the undeniable history of white violence that is part of Mississippi’s past, the blood that was spilled there, the blood of brown and Black bodies that seeped into the very earth and water of that place.
As a white person partnered with a Black man, it shouldn’t take my relationship for me to recognize what whiteness does. As the white parent of biracial children, it shouldn’t take imagining my own biracial son in Nolan’s place for me to feel the heartbreak of his parents. My connection to our shared humanity should be enough. Whiteness — or any other made-up human system — shouldn’t pull me away from my own humanity.
Yet I know that’s how whiteness shaped me.
The more I recognize what whiteness taught me, the more convinced I become that whiteness doesn’t only harm the people it excludes. It harms the people it promises to protect.
Because every time my humanity becomes smaller than someone else’s suffering, I lose something too. Every time I identify with power instead of human pain at the hands of power, I become less fully human. Every time I need to explain away someone else’s terror before I can grieve with them, I become less safe too.
That’s what whiteness was designed to do.
That’s why I keep writing about it. Because I need something more. And I’m writing about how whiteness has shaped me because it feels so heavy. Because it is so loud. And because it is so harmful — to all of us.
Whiteness is just one small story about how to be human in a whole, big world of stories. It’s the story I inherited. But I don’t want it. I don’t want that version of humanity.
I want a humanity that’s big enough to grieve every child. Every parent. Every family. A humanity that doesn’t require someone to look like me, love like me, or come from where I come from before I recognize their life as precious.
The more I pay attention, the harder it becomes to ignore what whiteness does — to the people it excludes, to the people it promises to protect, and to our shared humanity. For me, naming and resisting whiteness is part of reclaiming humanity. It’s part of refusing the stories and lies that separate us from one another and breaking the patterns of power and dehumanization those stories and lies depend on.