Why do you Care About Racism, You're White?
It’s a fair question. From what I’ve witnessed, white folks in the U.S. have had a complicated relationship with race and racism for a long time. So when white people say they care about racism, antiracism, or even race, it’s worth asking what we mean by that.
My short answer is, I care because it’s a white people problem too. It’s a problem we—white people—created. It’s one we’re needed to help fix.
I care because racial inequity is the ground I was planted in—a system I’m part of here in the U.S. I’ve found that when I can recognize a system and name my part in it, I’m better able to move through it in ways that can actually help change it.
The longer answer is because I care about equity. I care about freedom. I care about wholeness and common humanity. I care about helping to create a better world—one where power is shared, not hoarded.
And whiteness—the racial category I was born into—seems to get in the way of all of that.
I know. There’s that word again. Whiteness.
This word seems to confuse a lot of people. It also tends to bring up some pretty intense reactions. So let me try to be a little clearer about what I mean.
I’m not saying that all the people who are counted as white are bad. I’m not saying white people need to disappear. I’m not calling for the annihilation of humans who look like me.
I just said I care about humanity, freedom, and equity, and I mean that. Destroying people isn’t compatible with my ideas of humanity, freedom, or equity. Taking apart dehumanizing, oppressive, and inequitable systems is.
Whiteness is the word I use to try to describe something I’m still learning to unravel.
Whiteness is the thing our pale ancestors created in the U.S. to establish and maintain inequity based on skin color. It was invented to justify cruelty and violence against human beings—and it stuck. Whiteness isn’t individual white people. It is bigger than you, me, your uncle and his racist joke, or the Karen saying racist things on the internet.
Whiteness has been shaped by laws and policies. It’s been reinforced through institutions, social norms, and everyday practices. And it has influenced ideas about who belongs in the U.S., who is considered trustworthy, who is seen as dangerous, who gets access to resources and opportunities, and who gets to hold power.
Whiteness is something I inherited. Not because I chose it. Not because my white parents, teachers, or loved ones sat me down and said, “Here’s your whiteness. You’re going to need this.” But because I was born into a society where being white already had meaning.
I learned what it meant to be white here by growing up white here. I learned what was considered normal. I learned what we white folks talked about—and what we didn’t. I learned whose stories and perspectives were centered—and whose we could deny. I learned whose lived experiences were treated as universal.
I learned—by watching the white people around me—that some people were easier for us to care about than others. Not every single time but, but often enough that I picked up on the pattern, and started following it too. When a white person talked, white folks leaned in. When a white person cried, we softened. When a white person said they were hurt, we believed them. But when that same hurt came from someone who wasn’t white, it often got read differently—as anger, as an overreaction, or just as something to move past. Whiteness taught me whose pain to connect with—and whose pain to dismiss.
I didn’t choose whiteness, and neither did anyone else alive today. None of us chose the racial system we were born into. But I do get to choose what I do with it. That distinction matters to me.
We can question it. We can learn about it. We can notice how it has shaped us—individually and collectively. We can pay attention to, and name, what happens when we step outside the expectations and norms it has taught us. And, maybe most importantly, we can decide whether we want to keep reproducing it.
I’ve decided that reproducing racism—which for me also means going along with whiteness—isn’t something I’m interested in doing.
And I’ve learned something from trying to do things differently. I’ve come to see that whiteness has boundaries. Confines I can feel when I cross them.
I learned, early on, to be quiet about race. Don’t bring race into the room—ignore that whiteness has been in the room the whole time. Don’t talk about racism. And definitely don’t suggest that being white might actually have meaning, or might shape the way a person experiences the world.
So when I started telling the truth about racism I had witnessed—or about the racism experienced by the people I love—I was doing something different. When I started examining the ways whiteness shapes me—my assumptions, my relationships, my sense of safety, my understanding of fairness—I was doing something different. And I’ve noticed that white people sometimes have a lot to say when another white person starts doing that.
Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it sounds like: “Why are you making everything about race?” “I don’t see color.” “You’re creating division.” “Not all white people…”
And sometimes the message is simpler: Stop. Stop questioning. Stop talking. Stop bringing attention to whiteness.
These reactions tell me something. I don’t think discomfort automatically means we’re doing something wrong. And, for me, feeling discomfort definitely is not the same as being harmed.
Sometimes discomfort is what happens when a story we’ve lived inside for a long time starts to crack open. Sometimes unease comes when the only identity and belonging we’ve known begins to feel shaky. And I think these kinds of reactions matter.
Because if whiteness depends, even in part, on us not looking too closely at it, what is whiteness trying to hide? What are we trying to avoid by not looking at it too closely? Why does curiosity about whiteness feel scary, or harmful? Why does it seem to make so many of us defensive?
This tells me that there’s more to whiteness than I’ve learned—more than I’ve been able to notice and name. My connection, and the connection of white people as a group, to racism and race runs deeper than I’ve been able to fully acknowledge and understand. That makes me want to question whiteness even more.
Because the pattern I’ve already noticed about white people in the U.S. is hard to ignore.
We white folks here have historically received real advantages—legal, political, economic, social—through racial systems that excluded or disadvantaged people who were not considered white. Those systems did not simply disappear when the explicitly racist laws were changed. Their effects continue.
This is why I think racism is a white people problem too. And that brings me back to the question: Why do I care?
Because equity, freedom, wholeness, common humanity—the things I said I cared about at the start—don’t have room to exist and grow inside a system that still ranks human worth by skin color.
I care because I don’t want to spend my life defending or perpetuating a system that benefits only some of us. A system that advantages people who look like me as long as we play by its rules and stay within its bounds. A system that actively disadvantages people I care for.
I want something more than that.
I care about racism because I’m white. Not because I think white people are uniquely bad individuals. But because I’m part of the racial system I’m talking about. Whiteness taught me my role.
I inherited it. I benefit from parts of it. I’ve been shaped by it. And it’s on me to decide what I’m going to do with what I inherited.
I want to unlearn the ways I was taught to keep this system alive.
It’s something I suspect I’ll be doing for the rest of my life—untangling the things whiteness taught me. Becoming more honest. More willing to notice. More willing to listen. More willing to be changed.
And more willing to use whatever I can to help create something better.
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