Why in the World Would White Folks Walk Away From Whiteness?

Week Five

Let’s be honest, here. As a white woman, it doesn’t make any sense at all to walk away from something that benefits me most of the time. Why would anybody with the sense God gave them do that? Life is hard enough as it is.

But here’s what everyone misses. The gift of “whiteness” bestowed on European Americans’ ancestors wasn’t free. It cost us our humanity.

White folks have been duped to trade their humanity for their privilege…..The great fraud of the construct of whiteness is that it has coerced and convinced most white folks to no longer see their own oppression.

– Rev. angel Kyodo williams

The truth is that whiteness has colonized us. It’s claimed territory in our minds and our hearts that doesn’t belong to it. Promised us status and happiness and then exploited us – gave us shiny beads in exchange for our souls.

The bondage of whiteness is geographical and behavioral. Geographical because, especially in the United States, white folks tend to be trapped on islands of whiteness. It’s like living in Berlin must have felt like when Germany was divided. The wall in the United States is invisible though, snaking its way through every state and city, creating two Americas. One that’s better-resourced and connected to the levers of power. One that’s not. People do cross over from side to side, and we all notice it when they do.

Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind…. The Matrix

Our bondage is behavioral because instead of being fully ourselves we end up expressing ways of whiteness that are inherited and learned. The beliefs, behaviors, and complicities of whiteness are the matrix made visible – the ways we uphold the foundations of American society.

We need to walk away from whiteness because whiteness has hardened our hearts. I have within myself the terrifying capacity to shut off my heart like a switch. To do what has to be done.

White women hurled insults at six-year-old Ruby Bridges when Louisiana schools were desegregated. Their faces say it all. They had hardened their hearts to a child. Angry white parents threatened to hang her, to poison her. Ruby had nightmares about the child-sized coffin holding a black baby doll that protesters had placed at the entrance to the school. Adults who could do that to a child had souls that had gone into hiding.

Family separation at the southern border sixty years later could only have been done by adults who had hardened their hearts. Whiteness has taught us whose cries to heed and whose to ignore.

Probably more than anything else, the white male cultural trait of emotional moderation and restraint continues to define the group. White Men Can’t Jump, the title of a popular film, could easily be extended to cover, singing, dancing, laughing, or any kind of emoting. What can white men do? Work hard, keep a stiff upper lip, and don’t complain.

– Bill Proudman, founding partner of White Men As Full Diversity Partners

There’s a certain joylessness that permeates whiteness. I’m a stoic and serious person because I come from stoic and serious people. Hardened hearts repressing difficult emotions cause all of our feelings to be muted, including joy. This joyless existence isn’t what any of us want. We don’t have to be this way.

Black and brown joy is a real thing, a liberated thing that bubbles up for no particular reason. It lifts and lightens and sparkles. I’ve felt the lightness coming from the Latinx family on their picnic at the lake, the young Black women dancing at the protests. I feel it, though, as a spectator, unable to enter that space of lightness.

Maybe this heaviness we feel is a result of carrying all the ways of whiteness. We exhaust ourselves and everyone around us. As we shed them, might the bubbling up of joy be the unintended, but life-giving result?

We need to walk away because whiteness has hurt us all as Heather McGee wrote in her ground-breaking book The Sum of Us. She points out that during desegregation efforts in the 50s and 60s, many communities chose to decommission their city pools and close public parks rather than let everyone enjoy them. Unions that lifted up the middle class were broken along racial lines. Social goods in the form of universal health care and preschool were stymied. We can all have nice things, but not if we are constantly worried about who deserves them and why. We all deserve them.

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This winter in the United States we’re swept up in an avalanche of whiteness. The most powerful men in the country are leading the charge: Trump, Musk, Miller, Hegseth, et al. There’s an unsettling deadness to their eyes that shows they’re completely colonized. It would be so easy, such a relief, really, to point to the whiteness “out there” that these men magnify without also acknowledging the whiteness lurking “in here.”

It takes tremendous energy to scramble out of it, to fight the flow of gravity. It will take everything we’ve got and we might not make it. But we have to try, to fight for our humanity and the humanity of those who come after us.

I believe that the responsibility for dismantling white-body supremacy lies in the hands of white people. – Resmaa Menakem, Quaking of America

White folks walking away from whiteness is the only way racism (power with prejudice) will end. It was and is a bad idea to benefit some at the expense of others. It’s immoral. It’s soul-killing. I can’t live my faith this way, with this dis-ease that keeps me from loving. Separation from my brothers and sisters of color separates me from God. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:26 Amen. Let it be done.

We could, finally, close the curtain on this awful play, take off our masks, and all go home to ourselves. I’m not a white woman anymore, I’m a European-American woman in recovery from whiteness.

We are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. – James Baldwin

For discussion in the comments:

Why do you want to walk away from whiteness?