
Whites conflate accountability with hate. In my teacher preparation classes I teach predominately white students. Mainly white female students.

And I deliberately facilitate racial discourse with them b/c solutions exist in the discussion.
And we break down history. It’s painful for them to confront the role their ancestors played in damaging other communities. What happens is that white guilt can become so overwhelming that they just lose hope that they could ever be considered anything other than racist monsters to everyone else and so they just say fukk it and embrace it.
We talk about this process explicitly. I’ve told them they feeling guilty is useless and there are levels of culpability. The appropriate way for them to navigate confront the horror of the past is to first acknowledge it existed, acknowledge the long lasting effects of these actions, and have the courage to confront the power structures that seek to keep these disparities in place.
One of my students told me that it’s hard because doing so makes him lonely in that he risks alienating his entire family, but he knows their beliefs are dead wrong in a lot of ways.
I wish I could publish some of the essays a lot of them have written about some of the shyt we’ve discussed in class. It’s insightful.
Whites are humans like anybody else. But many have been corrupted absolutely by absolute power. It’s a difficult mental journey to unpack their collective role in the degrading of others and the ways they benefit and are hurt by systemic racist power structures.
I don’t hate them. I’m just honest with them about what needs to be addressed. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of kids willing to even go there and their responses. In my experience, it hasn’t been whites who were most resistance to acknowledging their role in inequity, but other racial groups and special interest groups. Had a guest lecturer come thru and discuss American immigrant appropriation of racism as a vehicle of power in America. Once he started talking about Asian and Latinos being footsoldiers in white supremacy there was a lotta


