White People May Be Well-Intentioned… Whiteness Is Not.

Growing up, one of the things I learned about being white in the U.S. is that we white folks have good intentions. I’ve heard us say it time and again. We mean well.

That’s the story about us that was repeated to me.

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

And there’s some truth in it. Many white people do have good intentions. But good intentions don’t tell the whole story.

Here’s why I say whiteness isn’t good. When I look at the history of whiteness, I see malice. I see that humans made up whiteness as a way to divide people and distribute rights, status, belonging, and access differently. A way to assign meaning and value to people based on racial categories and skin color.

I also see how maintaining whiteness has helped maintain unequal power and made it harder for people to come together against injustice. It’s a trap. It came out of cruelty and selfish ambition—a means of mastery and control that narrowed our imagination for what we could be together. A way to manufacture fear and justify violence.

And it has recruited well-intentioned white people into that project—generation after generation—often without our even realizing we’d signed up.

For a long time, I struggled to make sense of this: whiteness not being good, and my being connected to it. I couldn’t always name the struggle. But a nagging sense of unease, uncertainty, and dread about whiteness has followed me.

No one told me to feel this way. I can now say those feelings were a response to the world around me—the racism that is still with us, the racial inequity, violence, and division that mark my country, and the role whiteness plays in all of it. Add to that the expectations from whiteness to never look closely, never name it, and never talk about it.

I mean well. But when it came to race, for a long time, I wasn’t well within myself. My good intentions alone couldn’t help me interrogate, understand, and change my part in a problem that I sensed I was definitely tangled up in.

There are so many ways to think and talk about race and whiteness. I’m here offering what helps me—a white person in the U.S.—understand and relate to whiteness differently. What helps me name and change the ways I’ve been caught up in something I never asked to be a part of.

One distinction I find helpful is that we white folks are not whiteness. We’re humans born into—and caught up in—a story about race that was already being told long before many of us showed up. A powerful narrative that has justified and sustained racial inequity. Whiteness was created with a purpose and given meaning within that story. And we’re taught how to play a role that keeps that story, and the structures that support it, in place.

So yeah, just being white doesn’t make us bad people. But whiteness itself isn’t a good thing.

The racial reality that we have today didn’t simply happen. Racial inequity and violence aren’t unfortunate accidents. They have been constructed and reinforced over time. I’ve found that if I want to do good, and not just intend it, I need to do something about whiteness.

For me, it’s safe to say that almost everything I learned from whiteness taught me very little about how to pay attention to the real impact or story of race here. What whiteness did teach me was how to ignore almost everything about race. It showed me plenty of ways to protect my ignorance, too.

Now I’ve come to see that whiteness in this country has an origin story of sorts. Race wasn’t always organized in the ways it is today. Historians point to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 Virginia as one important part of that story.

Bacon’s Rebellion brought together enslaved Black people and Black and white indentured servants in Virginia’s deeply unequal system of labor and slavery. The rebellion alarmed the white colonial elite. In the years that followed, lawmakers began drawing sharper legal distinctions between “white” and “Black” inhabitants. People deemed white gained rights and status that were denied to people of African descent. The aim was to keep the two groups from uniting again.

By 1691, Virginia law was using the word “white” and requiring free white people who married Black, Indigenous, or mixed-race people to leave the colony. That boundary between people counted as white and those excluded from whiteness didn’t stay in the 1600s, and it didn’t stay in Virginia. In 1790, Congress restricted naturalization—the path to U.S. citizenship—to “free white persons.”

Courts then had to wrestle with who qualified as white enough to become a citizen. Between 1878 and 1952 there were at least fifty-two cases  that tried to determine who was legally white. The answers weren’t always consistent. People from similar ethnic or national backgrounds could be classified differently in different cases.

And Virginia kept legislating racial boundaries into the twentieth century. The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 defined a “white person” as someone with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” It also prohibited white people from marrying anyone who was not legally classified as white. That ban remained in place until 1967, when the Supreme Court struck it down in Loving v. Virginia.

It’s a pattern that didn’t simply disappear in 1967.

Writing whiteness into rules and norms, giving it boundaries, and guarding the line between who counts as white and who doesn’t is something we can trace through U.S. history, right up to the present. The language, laws, and categories may have changed. But I still see the same purpose and pattern at work—keeping some people away from things granted to others. The story and power structure keep getting carried forward.

The way I see it, the racial categories we inherited in the U.S. have never been neutral descriptions of human difference. In particular, my racial category—white—was constructed and reinforced with purpose. It was given meaning, along with other racial categories. And those meanings were passed down.

So were the stories and scripts that helped make those meanings feel normal, inherent, and true. And all of it had—and still has—consequences.

I wasn’t born knowing whiteness. I don’t think any of us are. We learn it.

I was fed an untrue story that made my whiteness innocent. It said racism was mostly in the past. All I had to do was be a good white person.

The script was pretty simple: Be kind. Treat everyone the same. Don’t judge people by the color of their skin. Have good intentions.

The stories and scripts I got from whiteness made it easier for me to see racial injustice as someone else’s problem. To mistake unequal outcomes for something lacking in the very people whiteness was built to keep down. To forget how much we might have in common with people whose lives and experiences were made to seem so different from ours. And they taught me ways of thinking, believing, and showing up that helped carry whiteness forward in everyday life—they told me this was what being a good white person looked like.

I saw these kinds of scripts modeled by other white folks. I was also taught what can happen when we stray from them. And I was given scripts for how to respond when the stories and meanings I learned about race are challenged.

Get defensive. Explain it away. Change the subject. Make myself the victim. Focus on my good intentions.

But good intentions can coexist with harm.

I can intend to be fair and still participate in something very unfair. I can care deeply about people and still carry harmful ideas and beliefs that I haven’t examined. I can believe everyone deserves belonging, safety, and ease, and still be playing a part in a story, and the structures built around it, that make those things easier to come by for some people than for others.

I can be a well-intentioned white person and still be shaped by whiteness.

The truth is, whiteness wasn’t created for good. And I’m finding that we can only run from the truth for so long.

I feel this is worth repeating: White folks, we are not whiteness. We inherited a story about race in the U.S. that was written over generations and reinforced through law, institutions, culture, and everyday life. We didn’t write it. But we are living inside it.

To me, this means we aren’t off the hook and we aren’t free. It means we have choices about what we do with what we’ve inherited. Moment by moment. Day by day. Relationship by relationship.

And I’m finding that when I can acknowledge that, I’m better able to choose whether to keep playing the part I was given.

For me, there’s freedom in facing the truth of whiteness.

Not freedom from the story of race. Freedom to figure out how to be accountable from within it. Freedom to understand myself and my country more honestly. Freedom to recognize that I can be a white person who means well and also be playing a part in a story of race that has caused—and continues to cause—harm. Freedom to join in the work of cultivating equity and taking apart whiteness, not because I hate being white, but because I care about the kind of person I want to be and the kind of world I want to help create.

And—maybe most importantly—freedom to do, and be, different.