White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better

The next time you refer to someone as your Asian intern or Black friend, think about how often you refer to colleagues or friends or yourself as white. My white boss. My white neighbor. Likely never. Please start now.

Erasing your white power is a prerequisite to being colorblind, and colorblindness is a form of racism. If you don’t see color, you don’t see your white power, and if you don’t see your white power, you don’t see your racism. And if you don’t see your racism, you cannot dismantle it. If you cannot dismantle it, you are actively supporting it.

White supremacy means that you—white people—are raised to see yourselves as the default. In your white cocoon, you see your white experience as the default lived experience. The rest of us have racial and ethnic identities: Black people, Indigenous people, Indian people, Mexican people, Chinese people. People of color.

.” Or you might even flat-out not believe what’s written here. White people expressing shock over racism is racism. It is a version of “not me,” “not all white people.” It is distancing yourself from the harm you all cause. It is kicking the can down the road, avoiding accountability. It is freezing, doing nothing besides being shocked.

There is white supremacy in mundane, everyday expressions. Black cats, black magic, black sheep in the family. All bad. White lies, better than regular lies. Even “white trash.” You don’t say “Black trash” or “brown trash,” ostensibly because it would be redundant in your white mind. When you say “white trash,” what you are saying is trash is by de

Your need for perfection, in fact, makes it impossible to engage in antiracism work.

So we are asked to explain your violence against us to you, which is traumatizing.

Not only is white woman exceptionalism false, but in it lies the implication that if you are the exception, other white women around you are the rule. You believe that you’re better than them. How can that be healthy? How can that be sisterhood?

Because you so greatly benefit from your whiteness, you work tirelessly to protect it. In a white supremacy culture like ours, not working tirelessly to dismantle it is the equivalent of working tirelessly to protect it. In other words, not acting is acting.