White People Hate Being Called 'White People'

The good-white identity isn’t an escape from whiteness, it’s just a the most sophisticated evolution of whiteness.

Yes, it’s true and y’all know it.

White folks hate being called white people.

They’ll call themselves Caucasian. European. Anglo-Saxon. Of Western heritage.
Italian-Irish-a-little-bit-Cherokee-on-my-grandmother’s-side.
“Actually Mediterranean.”
Maybe “basically Canadian.”
Nordic-adjacent.
From the British Isles.
They’ll tell you they’re descended from farmers, or they’re “just American,” or mixed but not in a way that counts.
You can call them citizens of the world.
Human.
Spiritual but not religious.
Sun-sensitive.
Ancestrally lactose-tolerant.
And my personal favorite, colorblind.

Anything, but, white.

And you sure as hell can’t be a Black writer calling them that.

Because the moment you say white, suddenly it sounds racial, and whiteness doesn’t like being reminded that it’s a race. It likes to pretend it’s oxygen. It’s everywhere, invisible, and essential until somebody starts measuring its carbon footprint. And then suddenly, it’s gasping, fanning itself, insisting it can’t breathe under all this “division.” And then, it starts wheezing about “unity” and demanding emotional reimbursement because your critique hurt its feelings.

That’s exactly what happened in my comment section after I wrote earlier this week about Donald Trump’s nasty AI video where he’s flying a fighter jet over the No Kings protest and defecating on the American people. I used the words white man to describe a psychosexual confession of what whiteness really thinks of the people beneath it.

And that’s all it took. The word white set off a chain reaction like I’d pulled the fire alarm in a Catholic rectory during rosary hour. Suddenly, the readers who claimed to love the essay started cracking like porcelain.

Check out the comments . . .

Lisa was the first to flinch. “I reread it without those references,” she said, “and it still works.” So, in other words, the ideal version of my essay is one where whiteness remains invisible and she can enjoy the moral insight without the mirror. For her, race is fine as long as it’s ornamental, not structural. The moment I made whiteness visible, it stopped being literature and started feeling like a liability.

Then came Miguel, trying to intellectualize the discomfort. He wrapped it in pseudo-philosophy by calling my framing “essentialist” and reminding me that “all sapiens are alike.” Which is exactly what whiteness says when it wants to stay unexamined. That’s the philosophical version of all lives matter. What he’s really saying is, “please don’t racialize me.” It’s the soft power move of somebody who is desperately trying to retreat into universalism where whiteness can dissolve back into “humanity” and avoid accountability. Miguel even tossed in a departing humblebrag about his “exotic English” as a way of masking a passive aggressive attempt to lecture me back into color-blind civility. Substack commenters like him won’t always outright call a Black woman writer angry, they’re more elegant with their shade and policing.

And then there was Perca, who came bearing moral sanitizer. “I don’t see a cruel white man; I see a sick human being,” she wrote, as if empathy could scrub the word white clean. Perca wanted to preserve goodness, not truth, to frame Trump’s grotesque behavior as a symptom, not a statement. Because if it’s sickness, it can be personal. But if it’s whiteness, it’s cultural. And that, apparently, is a bridge too far for Perca.

So what y’all see here is different tones but the same message: We like your analysis, just not the part that makes us visible.

And then came the pièce de résistance from Mary, who delivered a whole White Woman Soliloquy. It had everything, y’all. It had the moral résumé. The false equivalence. The plea for fairness. And a touch of emotional blackmail for flavor. She wanted me to know she’s one of the good ones. She is the kind of white woman who’s worked her “butt off for decades” to create a better world. She compared my use of white people to saying Black people steal, as if naming systemic power is the same as parroting a racial stereotype. She insisted on the importance of using modifiers like some, a few instead of being lumped in with the KKK.

And then came the grand finale: Why do you want to hurt us? Lawd, if that ain’t the altar call for white tears, I don’t know what is.

It was all there. Y’all see it. The carefully choreographed performance of innocence. Mary’s tone isn’t hateful. It is wounded. And that’s the ‘genius’ of it. When whiteness feels exposed, it doesn’t always attack, it emotes. It cries professionalism, fairness, empathy. It performs virtue like a magic trick.

When I wrote about Trump’s AI video and used the words white man, I wasn’t naming any of these white folks personally. I don’t even know them. I was naming a system. I was naming an historical architecture of power that uses whiteness as the operating software. But these commenters heard it as a personal indictment or as a moral eviction notice. Because whiteness, at its core, teaches people that their identity equals goodness. To be white is to be innocent. To be white is the default, neutral, objective, and moral. So when someone like me, a Black woman writer, uses the word white as analysis instead of flattery, it scrapes the paint off the illusion. Suddenly people like Mary are exposed, and she doesn’t know where to put that feeling.

So she does what whiteness always does when it’s cornered: it performs injury.

“Why do you want to hurt us?” is the tell.

That’s the pivot from accountability to accusation. She demands emotional reimbursement, which is the demand that I not only soothe the discomfort caused by my truth, but also apologize for creating it. Mary’s logic goes like this: if my words make her feel bad, I must have done something wrong. Because the unspoken social contract says white feelings are sacred property. And when a Black person disturbs that peace, even intellectually, even gently, we’re expected to fix it.

What’s fascinating is how her language echoes the same moral framework she claims to reject. She compares my naming of “white” to saying “Black people steal.” That’s false equivalence 101 and it reveals how deeply her moral imagination depends on symmetry. She wants racism to be a playground of equal opportunity, where everyone can take turns being offended. But that’s not how history works. One statement describes a systemic pattern of domination and the other is a centuries-old stereotype used to justify violence against Black folks. The fact that she can’t tell the difference is very telling.

When she says, “we worked our butts off for equality,” I don’t think she’s lying. But she ain’t tellin’ the whole truth either. What Mary’s describing is a moral investment portfolio. Y’all know the type of white folks who love to show you their receipts: decades of anti-racist book clubs, donations, marches, “good ally” posts, and strategic unfriending of problematic cousins every election cycle. In their minds, all that should be accruing interest. Her progressivism is basically a spiritual credit score. Mary thinks she’s got enough points to qualify for a racism-free mortgage. LMBAO.

So when I use “white man” critically, she feels her equity devaluing. That’s what she means by hurt. (Y’all like my use of linguistic economics? Somebody call the Federal Reserve of Feelings.)

It’s not pain. It’s depreciation.

And that’s what’s so revealing about her question: “Why won’t you do the same?” She thinks empathy is transactional and that if she learned not to say “Black people steal,” then I owe her the same courtesy. She doesn’t realize she’s asking for moral reciprocity in an unequal system. It’s like the empire asking the colony to stop bringing up colonization because it’s bad for morale.

This is the psychology of white innocence. It’s a self-image built on goodness that can’t metabolize accountability without converting it into injury.

The need for innocence is so powerful that it warps perception. When white folks are named as white, many don’t hear description, they hear accusation. The word white becomes a trigger because it drags the history of slavery, segregation, genocide, theft, empire, and propaganda into the room. The word itself becomes haunted. And when a Black writer speaks it, it feels like conjuring. That’s why her comment reads like an exorcism: Why are you hurting us? Why won’t you stop?

Every empire teaches its citizens that they are the heroes of the story. White liberalism, especially, runs on that script. It lets people believe they can inherit a racist system and still be blameless inside it. They don’t burn crosses, they recycle. They don’t say slurs, they post about diversity. They don’t kill, they “amplify voices.” So when you challenge the structure, they take it personally. Because they’ve mistaken moral performance for transformation.

This is the paradox of allyship, y’all. The same people who want to be seen helping are often the first to crumble when they’re seen at all.

And her plea for modifiers — “some,” “a few” — is the linguistic equivalent of a seatbelt. It’s how whiteness tries to strap itself in before the collision with truth. But structural analysis doesn’t need modifiers because the structure itself is the subject. Her demand for linguistic safety nets is really a demand for narrative control. She wants to edit history so it doesn’t bruise her.

And notice the emotional sleight of hand. She positions herself as the listener: “We listened to African American leaders.” What she really wants to say is We did the homework, so stop grading us. She’s measuring justice as compliance, not consciousness. What she wants isn’t equality but exemption. She wants to be told she’s one of the “good ones.”

That’s the thing about white innocence, it’s never just a feeling. It’s a performance that needs an audience. It thrives on applause, absolution, and reassurance that despite everything, you’re still seen as good. When you don’t give that, when you speak truth without cushioning it in gratitude, that sane white innocence panics. It starts bargaining for sympathy, projecting harm, or moralizing your tone.

You can hear the panic in that last line: “Why won’t you do the same?” What she’s really saying is, Please don’t take from me the one thing that makes being white bearable and that’s the belief that I’m not like the rest.

But that belief is the problem. Because the need to be “not like the rest” is what keeps the rest of the system intact. It’s how white people outsource guilt and sustain the myth that racism is someone else’s disease. The good-white identity isn’t an escape from whiteness, it’s just a the most sophisticated evolution of whiteness.

And this is why I’ve long felt that the phrase white fragility doesn’t quite capture it. Fragility suggests weakness, but this isn’t fragility, it’s armor and it gets strategically weaponized the way y’all see above with the examples I showed. The tears, the hurt, the pleas for modifiers, they’re defense mechanisms designed to shut down critique and re-establish emotional control. The goal isn’t understanding. It never is. It’s restoration of comfort.

What Mary calls hurt is actually history touching her skin.

When white innocence demands emotional reimbursement, it’s asking for history to apologize for telling the truth. It’s asking Black voices to be both educator and comforter, prophet and therapist, critic and caretaker. But I’m not in the business of restoring anyone’s peace with their myth.

My job is to tell the truth even if it shatters the delicate porcelain. Because that’s what truth sounds like when it finally hits the surface of denial.

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