“You’re Obsessed with Race.”

I got this feedback recently. I think I understand where they’re coming from. I do talk and write a whole lot about race.

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I agree that it does seem odd for a white person in the U.S. to talk and write so much about race. You think I’d run out of things to say. Alas, everyday life in my country continues to provide ample content for me.

But I do want to push back on one thing. I don’t talk and write about race—and especially whiteness—because I’m obsessed with it. I’m pretty passionate about some bigger things, though. Things like humanity, equity, freedom.

Humanity feels like the best word I have for something I sometimes struggle to put into words. It’s that part of us that moves toward other people instead of away. It’s the pull to care for people, to care for life, and to be connected to something that reaches beyond ourselves.

When I say humanity, I mean that very human thing that happens to us without us even trying. It’s the driver who pulls over the second they see a car accident, before they’ve even had time to think about it. It’s the person who runs toward a burning building, because someone might be inside.

It’s the way you can’t help but return a smile when a baby smiles your way. It’s when your eyes well up watching two people say their vows, even when you barely know them. It’s how the stranger’s story—on a podcast, in the news, in a video online—can catch you off guard and leave you wiping your eyes for someone you’ll probably never meet. It’s the ache you feel, even for just a second, when you watch someone else hurting and you feel it too. I believe that capacity to care for and relate to one another is part of our humanity.

I think many of us know this feeling. It’s interconnectedness—not as a concept, but something we can actually feel, in our chest, our throat, the back of our eyes. A reminder that what happens to someone else can touch something in us. We feel for each other. That might be one of the most human things about us.

And I don’t think this is just about how we treat each other. I think many of us feel a pull to care about life beyond our own. That thread of care doesn’t end with other humans.

That’s humanity. It’s not being too soft. It’s not silly or sentimental. It’s real. Maybe it’s the realest thing about us.

The part that gets me, though, is that so much of what U.S. culture and its systems teach us seems to push hard against our humanity.

Growing up here I learned we’re supposed to compete—that competition is more important than connection. I learned I need to prove my worth by what I produce. That someone else’s win is most likely my loss.

I learned that my time is worth more than someone else’s need for care. That it’s normal to walk past a person who’s asked for a moment of my attention, and that my right to do so matters more than what they’re asking for.

I was handed thousands of messages that told me, in ways both obvious and subtle, to deny the very things that make me human. To deny that we’re interconnected. To act instead like all of us are separate, self-made, and on our own.

I don’t believe separateness is who we really are. I think it’s who this culture shapes us to become. And I believe the story of interconnectedness and care—the part of our humanity I’ve been talking about—is something we can nourish. I think paying attention to what shrinks our humanity is part of how we get there.

Race is something that shrinks humanity. Whiteness shrinks mine.

That’s what whiteness in the U.S. was built to do from the very start. It was designed to shrink the humanity of anyone who wasn’t counted as white—to create a racial hierarchy that treated some people as fully human and others as less deserving of rights, belonging, freedom, and protection.

That shrinking made it possible to take Indigenous land and murder those who resisted. To enslave generations of Black people. To deny citizenship and rights based on skin color. To build laws, institutions, and every day practices around the idea that some lives were worth more than others.

Whiteness had to shrink something in the people counted as white, too. It had to shrink our capacity to feel connected to the very people we were harming. So we could see other people’s suffering as less urgent. So we could accept unequal freedom, safety, opportunity, and belonging as normal.

Two shrinkings, working together. One to help white folks believe we were superior. One to make sure we wouldn’t feel it when we treated other human beings as less than. Whiteness still operates this way today.

There are plenty of structures, systems, beliefs, and narratives embedded in U.S. society that get in the way of our ability to be human and free. They can get in the way of equity and care for everyone here. Race isn’t the only one.

But it’s one that directly involves me as a white person. It daily impacts my life and my multiracial family. And it’s one I feel well placed to help address, because I’m part of the group it wasn’t designed to harm.

For me, resisting whiteness is a way of reclaiming my humanity. There is no neutrality here—when there is inequity or injustice, I have to take a side. I’m choosing to be on the side of humanity, of equity, of freedom for everyone.

I want to live in a world where humanity, equity, and freedom aren’t just words we use to describe ourselves, but values we can actually see in how our families, communities, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, laws, and institutions function. Where we design our world to uphold them. Where the evidence that we care about the humanity and freedom of all people is visible in everyday life.

Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be true in the U.S.

I believe we can make something better. We’re not stuck with what we inherited. We can make something that looks more like equity and freedom for everybody. Something where human beings truly matter. A culture where people and life matter more than money, status, power, independence, productivity, or whatever else we might have been taught to put ahead of the lives and well-being of people.

The way I see it, if I’m serious about that, then I have to be willing to look at what’s already here.

I’ve got to look at my part in inequity. I’ve got to become acquainted with—and clearly name—the ways I was taught to shrink my own humanity and the humanity of other people. I’ve got to look at the things I picked up that have me standing in the way of equity and freedom, and in the way of protecting the dignity, agency, and inherent worth of all people. Because, despite my best efforts not to be, I am shaped inside systems that existed long before I got here.

Race is only one piece of that inequity. And I’m convinced—by data and everyday life—that race continues to be a determining factor in the lives of all of us here in the U.S. The way I’m connected to racial inequity is through whiteness.

I was born into whiteness. I was raised within it. It has shaped me from my very first breath.

I didn’t choose whiteness. But I will choose the part I’ll play in what happens next.

So yes, I talk and write about race a lot. Because I’ve come to a deep awareness that taking apart whiteness is about living out my own values. It’s about helping to create more space for equity, freedom, and humanity—including my own.  It’s about my sense of self and what it’s rooted in.

And maybe race isn’t really the thing I’m obsessed with. Maybe I’m obsessed with truth. Maybe I’m obsessed with imagination and possibility.

Maybe I’m obsessed with the possibility of reclaiming our humanity. Maybe I’m obsessed with the possibility that freedom could actually mean freedom for everybody. Maybe I’m obsessed with the possibility that equity could become something we practice everyday. Maybe I’m obsessed with the question of what becomes possible when we can stop defending the world we’ve inherited and start building something different together.

And if that means I keep talking about race and whiteness until real change comes? Well. I think I’ll have to live with that.