When Accountability Becomes Persecution: How Whiteness Rewrites the Story

I want to talk about a pattern we have in the U.S. I’m not the first person to point it out. It goes something like this: White people commit violence in defense of power. Then, over time, the story changes.

Photo by Dani Adkins on Unsplash

The people who caused the harm become the ones who were really harmed. Persecuted. Treated unfairly. Accountability becomes oppression. Consequences become cruelty.

And once the story flips, support often follows. Sympathy expands. Political legitimacy returns. Sometimes money does too.

Meanwhile, the people who were actually harmed are pushed to the margins of the story. Their suffering gets minimized, doubted, forgotten, or treated as something they should be over by now.

This isn’t a new pattern. It’s one I keep seeing throughout U.S. history. And I think naming it matters because we can’t interrupt a pattern we refuse to see.

I think it also matters because whiteness always seems to have an agenda. Part of that agenda is protecting white innocence, even after harm has been done.

Naming that has become part of how I disentangle myself from whiteness. Over the years, I’ve found that the more honest I become about whiteness — and about my own relationship to it as a white person — the more free I become. More whole. More capable of real relationship, and honest care.

Before we go further, I want to be clear about what I mean when I say whiteness. I don’t mean that every white person is individually malicious or deliberately trying to harm others. I mean whiteness as a social and political system — one that was designed to organize power and hierarchy, to decide who deserves protection and who doesn’t. The legal construction of whiteness helped justify violence while distributing status, resources, and safety unevenly.

And when I say violence, I don’t only mean physical assault — though it absolutely includes that. The World Health Organization defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or a community.”

I keep thinking about the “or power” part.

Because whiteness has long depended not only on direct acts of violence, but on the power to control the story afterward. The power to define what happened. The power to decide who was the threat and who was the innocent. The power to reposition white people — especially after committing violence — as misunderstood, persecuted, or unfairly treated.

That's the through line. And it runs all the way from the Civil War to the U.S. Capitol.

They Lost the War and Won the Story

White Confederate soldiers took up arms against the United States in defense of a Confederacy explicitly built to preserve slavery. Historians estimate roughly 700,000 people died in the Civil War. Nearly four million enslaved people were freed afterward — without land redistribution, without meaningful economic support, without reparations for generations of stolen labor, family separation, and violence.

But white Confederates began reshaping the story almost immediately.

In 1866, former Confederate writer Edward Pollard published The Lost Cause, reframing Confederates as victims rather than aggressors and minimizing slavery's central role in the war. Historians have documented how that mythology portrayed Reconstruction as an unjust punishment imposed on the white South — a vindictive federal government punishing noble, aggrieved people.

And once the story shifted, material support followed.

Former Confederate states established pension systems for Confederate veterans and widows. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate veterans. Ninety-three years after the war ended — in 1958 — Congress extended federal pensions to the last surviving widows of Confederate veterans.

Meanwhile, Black Union veterans and their families often had to fight through discrimination just to access pensions they were legally owed, while white slaveholders loyal to the Union were paid up to $300 for each enslaved person emancipated. Formerly enslaved Black people received nothing — no reparations for generations of stolen labor, family separation, and racial violence.

White men who fought for a government built on slavery were rehabilitated in public memory: memorialized through monuments, pardoned by a President, defended through mythology, financially supported by state and federal policy.

I keep asking myself: what does it do to a society when the enslaver becomes the sympathetic figure? What does it do to white people when we inherit those stories without ever questioning them?

Conquest Dressed as Protection

As white settlers expanded across North America, Native nations were displaced through warfare, forced removal, broken treaties, starvation policies, massacres, and land seizure. U.S. expansion depended on both direct violence and the legal restructuring of land ownership around white settlement.

And yet, throughout much of U.S. history, white settlers were framed as the endangered group.

President Andrew Jackson and his supporters argued that Native nations standing in the way of white expansion created danger, instability, and hardship for white settlers. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was publicly framed not as conquest, but as protection and "civilization."

What followed was devastating. Around 100,000 Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their homelands in the Southeast. Approximately 16,000 Cherokee people were removed from their ancestral lands, and around 4,000 died from illness, starvation, and exposure — in what became known as the Trail of Tears.

And still, the dominant public story centered white grievance.

Native resistance to land theft was framed as aggression rather than defense. Whiteness positioned itself as vulnerable while expanding through violence. And then, the story shifted toward celebrating westward expansion as bravery and destiny — rather than honestly reckoning with what it actually was — cruelty and theft.

The Court Chose White Power Over Black Lives

In April 1873, hundreds of armed white men — including members of white supremacist paramilitary groups — attacked Black citizens gathered at a courthouse in Colfax, LA. The violence grew from a disputed election during Reconstruction. Black residents and Republican officeholders were defending a legitimately elected government when white attackers moved to seize power by force.

More than 100 Black men were killed — many after they had already surrendered.

Federal prosecutors tried to hold perpetrators liable under post-Civil War Enforcement Acts. But in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court severely limited the federal government's ability to prosecute racial terror carried out by private individuals.

No one was ultimately held accountable for the massacre.

The protection of white local power became more important than protecting Black citizens, democratic participation, or the lives of the people who had been murdered. Federal intervention against white racial violence was treated as the greater threat.

They Were Being Killed. The Story Said They Were the Danger.

In the late 1800s, Chinese immigrants across the Western U.S. faced white mob violence, expulsions, segregation, and exclusion laws. Chinese laborers helped build the railroads and worked dangerous, low-paid jobs that powered U.S. expansion. But as economic anxiety grew among white workers and politicians, Chinese immigrants were increasingly framed as the threat.

In 1885, white miners in Rock Springs, WY attacked Chinese workers, killing at least 28 people and forcing hundreds to flee. White workers claimed Chinese laborers were "taking jobs" and harming white workers — even as Chinese immigrants were being exploited and denied basic protections.

White violence was reframed as understandable frustration. The people being attacked, expelled, and killed became the supposed danger. That narrative helped pave the way for the Chinese Exclusion Act — often described as the first major federal law restricting immigration based explicitly on race and nationality.

Again: whiteness positioned itself as endangered after committing violence.

They Stole an Election and Called It "A Glorious Day For White Supremacy"

In Wilmington, NC, Black residents and white Republicans built a successful multiracial government during the 1890s. Then, on November 10, 1898, more than 2,000 armed white men overthrew that government by force.

They burned a Black-owned newspaper. They killed Black residents. They forced elected officials from office at gunpoint. Historians now recognize it as the only successful coup d'état in U.S. history.

But the violent white perpetrators didn't see themselves aggressors. They saw themselves as the ones in danger.

They spread false narratives about Black men threatening white women and used those fabricated fears to justify racial terror and political violence. Local white media and political institutions helped distort what happened, portraying the violence as a conflict sparked by Black aggression instead of what it actually was: methodical white supremacist terror aimed at stealing power from Black citizens and the multiracial coalition they helped build.

The violence itself was not enough. The story had to change too.

They Burned It Down and Called It a Riot

The Greenwood District in Tulsa, OK — often called Black Wall Street — was one of the most prosperous Black communities in the country.

On May 31 and June 1, 1921, white mobs — backed by local police and the National Guard — invaded Greenwood and destroyed roughly 35 square blocks. 1,200 homes were obliterated. Businesses built over generations were wiped out. Black residents were shot in the streets, detained in internment sites, and forced to flee. Between 100 and 300 Black people were killed. Thousands more were left homeless almost overnight.

And then much of the country called it a riot.

That word matters. Riot suggests mutual chaos. Shared blame. But this was organized white violence — supported by local and national law enforcement — directed at a thriving Black community.

No one was criminally prosecuted. Insurance companies largely denied claims filed by Black residents, often citing riot clauses to avoid paying. Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found the massacre caused long-term declines in Black homeownership, property values, and wealth accumulation in Tulsa for generations.

The people harmed were denied safety, justice, and an honest public story about what had been done to them.

Black Children Were Terrorized. White Parents Called Themselves the Victims.

After Brown v. Board of Education ruled school segregation unconstitutional in 1954, white politicians and communities across the South organized what became known as “Massive Resistance.”

Rather than centering the harm Black children had endured under segregation, many white people reframed integration itself as the injustice. White parents described themselves as victims of federal overreach. White politicians claimed their communities were under attack. Some states shut down public schools entirely rather than share them.

Meanwhile, Black children faced threats, harassment, violence, and isolation — simply for trying to attend school.

Again, whiteness repositioned itself as in peril when asked to share power, protection, and access.

Four Girls Were Murdered. The System That Built It Wasn't Named.

On September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL — a central organizing space for the Civil Rights Movement. Four Black girls were killed: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.

Suspects were identified relatively quickly, but prosecutions stalled for years. One perpetrator wasn't convicted until 1977 — fourteen years later.

Meanwhile, many white Americans still viewed themselves as the ones victimized — by integration, by federal intervention, by the Civil Rights Movement itself. White parents described themselves as protecting their children. White politicians spoke about "states' rights," "law and order," and "outside agitators." Many white communities portrayed federal civil rights intervention not as an attempt to stop racial terror, but as an attack on their way of life.

The grievances of white communities resisting racial equality were treated as urgent and legitimate. The terror inflicted on Black communities was minimized, delayed, and compartmentalized as isolated extremism — rather than recognized as part of a larger system protecting white power.

They Stormed the Capitol. Now They Want Compensation.

And now we're here.

On January 6, 2021, a mostly white mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop certification of the presidential election. More than 140 law enforcement officers were injured defending the building and the people inside it.

Officer Harry Dunn testified that rioters hurled racist slurs at him while he defended the Capitol. Sgt. Aquilino Gonelldescribed being beaten and crushed by the crowd. The violence was documented in real time through video, photographs, testimony, and court records. Many of those involved were investigated, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced.

And then the story began to shift.

Some of the white people who attacked the Capitol were increasingly reframed as victims. "Political prisoners." Patriots unfairly persecuted by the government. The focus moved away from the officers who were assaulted, away from an assault on our democracy, and toward sympathy for many of the people who assaulted them.

That shift matters — because it follows a pattern we've seen before.

The officers who defended the Capitol have not received the same public sympathy or narrative protection that many January 6 defendants now receive in some political circles. Their testimony has been questioned. Their injuries minimized. Meanwhile, some of the people who attacked them are discussed primarily through the lens of what was later done to them — investigated, prosecuted, jailed.

Trump later pardoned nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with January 6th. Now the administration's "Anti-Weaponization Fund" may allow some participants to seek taxpayer-funded compensation, tied to claims of political persecution.

The people who defended the Capitol may receive nothing. Some of the people who attacked it may receive taxpayer money.

The pattern feels painfully familiar.

What This Does to All of Us

This is not only about isolated moments in history. It's about what happens to a society when truth repeatedly bends around protecting white innocence and white grievance.

Research published in Perspectives on Politics found that perceived victimhood and white identity were among the strongest predictors of support for political violence. Research published through PMC / National Library of Medicinefound that when political violence goes unaddressed, trust in democratic participation erodes broadly. The Brookings Institution similarly documents how political violence damages civic life over time.

When we live inside distorted narratives, it can damage our ability to see one another clearly. It can weaken relationships. It can narrow empathy. It can disconnect us from reality — and from each other.

How can we build justice when we refuse to honestly name injustice? How can any of us become free while living inside stories designed to protect hierarchy rather than truth?

I don't think freedom can survive inside denial for very long. Not real freedom.

So Who Are We Becoming?

I don't have a perfect answer. What I do know is that one of the systems I most directly benefit from as a white person in the U.S. is whiteness. It's also one of the systems causing immense harm to people I love.

And I believe something changes when more white people become willing to notice the pattern, name it honestly, and stop participating in it.

Because if we don't actively resist the patterns we inherit, we absorb them. We reproduce them. We pass them on.

This work isn't only about identifying what whiteness has done historically. I think it's also about imagination — about asking whether we are becoming people capable of telling truer stories. Taking accountability. Building different relationships. Creating forms of belonging not dependent on denial, domination, or selective memory.

The pattern is old. It is still alive. But it is not inevitable.

And I think one of the ways toward something genuinely free — for any of us — is to be willing to tell the truth about where we actually are, who we've been, and what we want to become instead.

We can be those people. I hope we will be.