“Don’t let it in!”

“They want us to feel defeated.”

“Our pain soothes their souls.”

“We gotta play the long game.”

“God got this. God is fighting our battles. We just gotta wait on the Lord.”

I am assured by my European American friends and family that Black people are not alone. Yes, 1) they see what we see. 2) They disagree with the current events of injustice 3) and they stand with us. The problem does not lie with them. In their eyes, they love Black people and see us as human. Racism hurts; they wish they could stop it.

The question becomes: What can Black people do? We can’t be safe - meaning be fully white - and our humanity is denied, not at the individual level, but through systemic outcomes.

The judge feels innocent.

The 12 members of the jury feel innocent.

The prosecutor feels innocent.

The witnesses feel innocent.

Yet, the outcome is guilty of first degree murder and a 35 year sentence.

For those who remain courageous - the 49 who have paid for the privilege - please continue reading.

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For generations, the dominant white culture treated racial equity, corruption and injustice as civic projects for European Americans to manage at their leisure. They are hobbies, like gardening, jogging or cheering for a sports team. Today, survival and progress hinge on a much more raw, internal reality: White people admitting they are terrified of each other. The impotence on display is coming from somewhere; somewhere deep within the collective white psyche.

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Only 43 subscribers will be able to read the following essay, which took me a month of research to produce. I would like more of you to be able to access the material published here. To do so, you have to make a commitment. $8 for the month of June 2026 or $80 for the rest of the year. Supporting this work is worth it.

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​The comment reads:

​“What if a European American doesn’t identify with oppressors because they haven’t actively oppressed?”

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The Black student of psychology just graduated. He expressed several concerns how he was taught “the mind” and the process of “emotional attachments.”

In contrast, the European American is a practicing therapist on the cutting edge of applying techniques outside the canon of Western thought. He is becoming an expert for those suffering from the acute identity crisis named here.

Both gave their stamp of approval. Please receive this article for what it is: insight. If you are a free subscriber, choose to upgrade to paid (at least) until after Juneteenth, because whatever MAGA represents, it is not “freedom” or a definition of “humanity” which will serve us, collectively, in the 21st century.

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By Danel Griffin (Guest writer)

When former Navy SEAL and pro-wrestler Jesse “the Body” Ventura rattled the political world by being elected the thirty-eighth governor of Minnesota in 1998, it was more than just his celebrity and unconventional campaign that turned heads: To date, Ventura won the highest office ever awarded to a third-party candidate in American history – a distinction he shares with a nearly microscopic fraction of elected officials.

As a vocal critic of America’s rival political parties, these were odds that no one expected Ventura to beat. The American two-party system, all we all know, has been a defining feature of U.S. politics since the country’s earliest years, and its evolution has shaped the nation’s democratic process. The system is primarily dominated by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, which have alternated in power since the mid-19th century – though their origins and development trace back to different eras in American history. The nature of the American political system leaves very little room for third party options, so it is always noteworthy when a third party candidate manages a win. As a member of the Reform Party (founded by Ross Perot, himself one of the most successful third-party presidential candidates), Ventura thus arrived in Washington DC as an outsider from the two-party system that has defined the United States’ body politic.

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The Brother Attorney details a courtroom experience in the Mid-West. The judge reprimanded him for being inside the courtroom when defendants are required to stand in the hallway until allowed into chambers.

Stevenson felt instant anger to that disrespect!

Unfortunately, the Brother Attorney had to control his emotions and calmly explain to the white man, in a black robe, that he wasn’t any Black man living inside of the judge’s imagination but a Black lawyer representing one of the Black defendants standing obediently in the hallway. In response to this correction, the judge laughed and the white prosecutor joined him in awkward laughter.

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As Black psychologist Resmaa Menakem brilliantly argues, white supremacy isn’t just an ideology: it’s a culture; a physical practice. It’s the way the collective white body manages its own trauma and discomfort by discharging that energy onto Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. For the white-bodied individual, racism isn’t just a “bad thought”—it’s a soothing mechanism.

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Warning: Although my last few Substack articles were centered on historical documents, books and breaking down complex ideas into useful, digestible counter-arguments, this one will be filled with snark. Why? Because, the air inside the United States is polluted with the thick scent of recycled racist rhetoric and the stale perfume of a “golden age” that never truly existed for those of us walking in the skin of the sun. I’m Black and I am going to speak the Truth, even if it cost me my life. Call it courage!

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Dr. James P. Comer, a titan of social psychiatry and a pioneer in child development at Yale University, didn’t just study the symptoms of the segregated society he was born into; out of necessity, he systematically mapped the neurological and cultural plumbing that kept it from leaking.

Best known for the Comer School Development Program, he revolutionized urban education by emphasizing that a child’s academic success is inextricably linked to their social and emotional health.

​But in 1972, Comer stepped away from the schoolhouse to enter the head-space of the oppressor. In his seminal work, “Beyond Black and White,” he identified a peculiar cognitive phenomenon. He didn’t call it madness—madness implies a breakdown of mental functioning. Instead, he invented a “new” concept calling it the “white mind.”

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​To maintain the illusion of the “self-made man/woman,” one must be committed to a profound level of cognitive dissonance. This is where the work of Dr. Jay Klusky and Andrew Hacker become essential. On pages 155-156 in his 2017 book, “Reverse Integration: Helping White America Join the Village,” Dr. Klusky revisits a haunting thought experiment from Hacker’s 1992 classic, “Two Nations.”

​Professor Hacker once asked a room of white college students from Queens, New York to imagine that a mysterious official visited them to apologize for a “clerical error.” Starting at midnight, each student would live the next 50 years—the remainder of their lives—as Black people. Their souls, memories, relationships and personalities would remain intact, but their “outer casing” would be Black. To “compensate” for this mistake, the official offered them a settlement.

AFTER SIX LONG YEARS OF INTELLECTUAL AND EMOTIONAL LABOR, I CONTINUE TO SEARCH FOR CONTENT STUDENTS, NOT CONTENT CONSUMERS.

PLEASE ENTERTAIN THE IDEA OF UPGRADING TO A PAID SUBSCRIPTION TO READ THIS INSTALLMENT IN THIS SERIES DESCRIBING THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WHITENESS!

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TO FULLY ACCESS THIS PhD-LEVEL ANALYSIS, PLEASE ENTERTAIN THE IDEA OF UPGRADING TO A PAID SUBSCRIPTION.

To illustrate my point, in this brief examination, I will attempt to utilize a “story” I hope is ubiquitous: the Montgomery Bus Boycott. My hope is based on the existence of the Dr. King holiday. Of his campaigns, this one is retold the most.

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THIS IS A FREE ARTICLE. IT WILL BE THE LAST FREE ARTICLE ON THIS SUBSTACK UNTIL AFTER JUNETEENTH. IT IS BEING PRESENTED HERE AS A DEMONSTRATION OF THE QUALITY OF THOUGHT ON DISPLAY VIA THIS COMMUNICATIONS MEDIUM.

PLEASE CHOOSE TO UPGRADE TO A PAID SUBSCRIPTION. PLEASE SUPPORT A MOVEMENT AMONG THE GRASSROOTS TO CREATE PATHWAYS OUT OF WHITE SUPREMACY. ALL OF US NEED TO GO ON OUR HEALING JOURNEYS.

​As a Black man standing on Turtle Island soil, my reality of “what” is shaped by the contours of a racial caste system that acts as both a mirror and a wall. I look at my white brothers, white sisters and white queers—specifically those Gen X-ers who were sold a dream that turned into a haunting of historical ghosts—and I realize there is a profound psychological distance between us. I do not know what it feels like to move through the world in a white body. I have no lived experience in that skin. To understand the white psyche, I must use my imagination, peering across a divide created by five centuries of calculated fiction.

​Contrary to popular opinion in the collective white consciousness, we must start with the truth: “whiteness” is a recent invention. It is not a biological fact; it is a legal and psychological contract. Before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, people were English, Irish, German, or Italian. They became “white” only when the engine of chattel slavery required a moral anesthesia. Whiteness was the narcotic used to numb the conscience of Europeans so they could profit from the flesh of Mama Africa.

​From what I can observe, the European American Gen X-er feels a psychological pressure being tethered to “white supremacy” that is a unique, heavy burden. It is the weight of being associated with a system that demands your soul in exchange for your safety. You are living inside a ghost story that your Ancestors wrote, that you can no longer deny connection to because now the house is starting to shake.

​The Silence of the Suburbs

​Unlike the millions having a racial reckoning, I did not grow up in the manicured silence of an all-white suburb. White racial innocence is not my birthright. I did not spend my childhood in a geographical bubble, unaware that the very ground I walked on was curated by segregation.

​Many of my European American peers were raised by the same “Civil Rights Movement Generation” I was, except their parents were the ones who MADE the schools my parents integrated into hostile environments. To cope with how their actions were framed on the evening news they retreated into a deep, clinical denial. As adults, they told their children–my peers–that segregation was over. The “problem” was solved because they had changed. They weren’t like their grandparents. This fiction was told while millions of white bodies moved from the city into suburban neighborhoods where the mortgage deeds explicitly forbade Black ownership.

​Denial is the heartbeat of the caste system. It allows those who benefit to enjoy the fruit while claiming they never saw the tree.

​Unlike my European American friends, I didn’t have to “discover” white supremacy after leaving home. For me, it wasn’t a college elective or a workplace realization: it was in the atmosphere and presence of white bodies. But for the “white” Gen X-er, there is a traumatic rupture that occurs when he/she/they finally interact with Black, Brown and Indigenous humanity. They realize their upbringing wasn’t just “normal”—it was extracted. They discover that the “colorblindness” they were taught was not a virtue, but a necessary psychological blindfold.

​The Resentment of “Correction”

​I did not grow up hearing that “not seeing color” was the height of political correctness. I didn’t watch the adults in my life struggle with this basic demand of human decency, viewing the call to be non-racist as “authoritarian overreach.”

​There is a specific resentment that flows through the white body when the government tells it how to behave. For many, the laws generated from boycotts and protests led by Black people, weren’t seen as a valid moral reckoning, but as a hostile takeover. They resented being forced to integrate in order to access federal funds. To them, equality felt like oppression because they had become addicted to the drug of “priority.” While many did not feel “supreme,” like the rich and famous among them. What they were able to access was being first. When they felt bad about themselves or the lack of opportunity for economic gain, many “ate Jim Crow,” as Dr. King opined in his last book, “Chaos of Community: Where Do We Go From Here?”

​I have watched from the outside as European Americans struggle to navigate this tension—wanting the money, but hating the “mandate” to treat me as a human being. I don’t know the internal rot that comes from being raised in a home where “being nice” to Black people is seen as a chore imposed by the state, rather than a function of the heart.

​There is a specific horror in realizing that the history books, and history teachers, purposely lied to you by omission. I grew up knowing exactly what “bad things” flowed from the hands of white power. Why? My survival depended on that knowledge. But my European American counterparts often grow up in a state of manufactured innocence.

And, I don’t blame them. Who wants to view their parents as conscious oppressors? That seems to land as psychopathic. Who wants to view themselves as inherently oppressive?

​Then comes the awakening. And, it is painful. You realize that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are having a different experience than you. They have a library of your family’s secrets that you were never allowed to check out. You realize we–Black, Brown and Indigenous people–are being “nice” to you, not because we are unaware of the violence of whiteness, but because we are navigating the minefield of your potential fragility.

​Even if you, as an individual, are not violent, whiteness is. The skin you wear is the uniform of the aggressor in the eyes of the global majority. Because racial violence affects the victim, it inevitably poisons the one associated with the victimizer. You are associated, by pigment alone, with every policy that flows out of a White House—whether under Trump or any other figurehead—that seeks to affirm the caste system.

​The Inability to Defend the Self

​Perhaps the most isolating part of the European American Gen X experience today is the inability for the individual personality to defend itself in the public sphere. When the machinery of white supremacy cranks up—when the Trump Administration (and by extension the MAGA “cult”) becomes bold and state-sponsored violence turns even on white bodies—the “good” European American finds themselves paralyzed. Race is (now) happening to them, in a way they can not escape.

​From skin color alone, you [insert your name] are drafted into a civil war you might not want to fight. You find yourself unable to effectively proclaim “I am not racist” because the system you benefit from–the only economic and political system that you know–is screaming the opposite. Your silence is interpreted as complicity, and your speech is often viewed as performative. This is the “caste trap!”

​The Call to Reconstruction

​So, what is the work? What are you being asked to do?

If I am to use my imagination to bridge this gap, I see that the white body needs its own liberation movement. You cannot be “sovereign” as long as you are hiding behind the fortresses of whiteness.

​1) Acknowledge the Historical Fiction: As difficult as it is, please, stop trying to defend “whiteness.” It was a lie created by your Ancestors to make them feel better as tools for the colonial elite. Even though you are dealing with the inner horror of not “feeling any connection to anything,” the challenge before you is to find your actual heritage—discover your Irish-ness, your Polish-ness, your connection to humanity—and divest from the “white” social contract.

2) ​Face the Inheritance: Please stop pretending the suburbs were an accident, or the result of choice. Recognize your childhood for what it was. Everything you associate with good–your “self-care and peace” is/was bought through the “pain and displacement” of Black, Brown and Indigenous people.

​3) End the Denial: Your parents’, and grandparents’, silence about segregation didn’t protect you. To the contrary: it ill-equipped you for a multi-cultural world, where being “white” was no longer an asset.

​4) Accept the Association: Although it is tried daily in comment sections, you cannot argue or wish away your direct association with the racial caste system called the United States of America. You must choose to go on your healing journey and learn the definition of justice Dr. King taught, not what your white bodied ethic professor taught. And, that hurts. You must become so radically committed to justice–a positive good, not a punishment–that whiteness ceases to hold any value or currency.

The Ancestors are watching us all. I am reminded every February that mine didn’t survive the fire so I could make sand castles with their ashes. The sun is rising on a new concept of a world where racial categories no longer exist. The question–the challenge–before you isn’t whether you can prove you aren’t a racist; the question is: Are you brave enough to be a human being as defined outside of white supremacy culture?

​To understand the soul–is that the appropriate word?--of the European American value system, you and I must choose to walk away from the founding myth of America and stop looking at President Ronald Reagan’s metaphor of the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” Instead, I am going to ask you and I to start looking at the ledger books of the Virginia Company, which started the Virginia colony in 1607.

Pause. Take a deep breath. Yes, I know, after the 2021 battle over critical race theory, what passes for common historical knowledge is . . .borderline criminal. In classrooms designed by politics, not educational rigor, students continue to be taught to view “American values” as divinely inspired and universal because they are born from the “pure intellectualism” of the European Enlightenment era (1685 - 1815.) But truth is a stubborn thing. These values—1) material wealth, 2) individualism, and the elevation of 3) personal freedom over human rights—did not descend from the heavens; they were hammered out in the legislative chambers of colonial assemblies to protect the interests of property and the preservation of a racial caste system.

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To understand the gravity of this dark night of the modern “American” soul, we have to look past the legislative records and into the epigenetic marrow of their day-to-day existence. We have to talk about something too many remain ignorant of: the Cherry Blossom Experiment—more formally known as the “Dias and Ressler study on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.”

​The Biology of a Blind Spot

​In this study, (white) mice were exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms while simultaneously receiving electric shocks. Predictably, they developed a fear of the smell.

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Part of the problem lies in the power of language - framing the narrative so to speak - which is a subtle, shifting sandlot. Nowhere is this more evident than when discussing race. In the struggle for self-definition within the belly of this “North American experiment,” we are often forced to settle for the blunt trauma of calling those who occupy the oppressor caste by the racial category of “white,” or worse, by the nebulous fog of the word: “American.” But if we are to speak with the precision required for true liberation and historical honesty, we must recognize that “European American” is the only term that carries the weight of ancestry, the geography of origin, and the reality of the social contract.

​Allow me to explain. To call a man, woman or child “white” is to describe a political status, not a person. To call those same beings simply “American” is to engage in a vanishing act that erases the specific cultural engines that built the colonial infrastructure. We must look at the roots to understand the fruit.

​I. The Franklin Dilemma: The Crisis of the Trans-Atlantic Identity

​Thankfully, the “founding fathers” of the United States worshipped the written word. They left detailed records of their thoughts in their own handwriting.

For our purposes, let us look at the writings of Benjamin Franklin, the quintessential “American” multi-genius, who spent much of his life in a state of intellectual friction regarding who actually belonged to the “lovely White” category he sought to preserve through a “revolutionary war.”

Yes, I am aware that many “Americans” are historically illiterate and have no idea that Franklin wrote anything on race or argued to be personally labelled as “white.”

In his 1751 essay, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, Etc,” Franklin revealed a profound internal struggle. He was not merely trying to distinguish “Americans” from the British Crown; he was trying to figure out which Europeans were “white” enough to inherit the stolen soil originally called Turtle Island.

In this essay, the image of the balding curious scientist popularized in school books disappears. Instead, his words reveal the cold, cruel calculating mind of a colonialist!

Writing from the rugged edge of the British Empire, Franklin posits that the vast, “empty” American landscape—conveniently ignoring the Indigenous tribes and clans already there—is a fertile plane for exponential human growth. (Human?) He argues that in the “New World,” (see usage of colonial language) land is cheap and labor is dear, allowing the common man to marry young and multiply with a vigor unseen in the cramped, exhausted quarters of Europe.

​Franklin’s logic is terrifying. He views populations like plants that fill whatever space is cleared for them. However, his vision is stained by a newly emerging racial consciousness.

He champions a “Saxon” purity, fretting over the influx of “swarthy” Germans and the “corrupting” influence of enslaved labor, which he argues makes the “white man” lazy while stifling natural population growth.

​Ultimately, this essay isn’t just a census forecast; it is a bold, geopolitical manifesto. Franklin predicts that the American colonies will eventually outstrip Britain in numbers and power, signaling the inevitable shift of the imperial sun from the “Old World” to the New. (More colonial language!)

​Franklin viewed the “Palatine Boors” (Germans) with suspicion, fearing they would “Germanize” Pennsylvania instead of us “Anglifying” them. To Franklin, being “American” wasn’t a finished product; it was a precarious English project. He famously excluded Swedes, French, and even Russians from his definition of “purely white” people.

​”The Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted...” he writes.

​By witnessing Franklin’s intellectual struggle, we see that both the term and category: “white” is a moving goalpost. If the founding fathers couldn’t agree on who was white, the term is a historical fiction. European American, however, acknowledges the specific ethnic migrations—the English, the German, the French—that Franklin wrestled with. It recognizes that these men did not drop from the sky as “Americans”; they were Europeans transplanting a specific continental consciousness onto Indigenous land.

​II. The Legal Alchemy of “Whiteness”

​A second historical reason for using the term European American lies in the legislative records of the 17th-century Chesapeake Bay. Before the 1680s, the Virginia colony rarely utilized “white” as a primary descriptor. Men, women and children were identified as English, Irish, or Dutch. The transition to “white” was a deliberate legal maneuver designed to sever the burgeoning solidarity between European indentured servants and enslaved Africans.

​By adopting the term “white,” the ruling planter class offered a “psychological wage”—a bribe of status that cost nothing in gold but everything in soul. (See Dr. W.E.B. DuBois for the definition of this term, as he coined it in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction.) This term erased the distinct histories of the Irish peasant or the English laborer, folding them into a monolith defined solely by what they were not (Black). To use the term “white” today is to continue the work of those colonial overseers.

​European American restores the historical truth. It demands that we acknowledge the European origins of the legal systems and social hierarchies established during the colonial era. It forces the descendant of the immigrant to reckon with their specific cultural heritage rather than hiding behind a generic shield of racial privilege. It moves the conversation from a biological lie to a geopolitical reality.

​III. The Erasure of Geography and the Myth of the “Blank Slate”

​Finally, the term “American” is often used as a tool of American Exceptionalism—the idea that once a person crosses the Atlantic, they are magically shorn of their old-world sins and cultural biases. This “blank slate” mythology suggests that the term “American” is a neutral identity. It is not!

​The architecture of the United States—its jurisprudence, its Protestant work ethic, its Cartesian dualism—is a direct export from the European continent, specifically, the Enlightenment era. When we use the term “American” to describe the dominant group, we suggest that their culture is the “standard” and everyone else (African American, Mexican American, Asian American) is a “hyphenated” deviation.

​By using European American, we level the linguistic playing field. It identifies the dominant culture as just one of many diasporas. It acknowledges that the “American” identity was crafted by European minds using European tools for European ends. It stops the theft of the word “American” from the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere and places the descendants of Europe back into the global context of migration and settlement.

​The Necessity of Precision

​Almost daily, I plead for us raised in this racial caste system to go on our collective healing journeys. Mind you, we cannot heal what we cannot name. “White” is a ghost, a political phantom designed to maintain a hierarchy. “American” is a destination, not a heritage.

But European American is a historical fact. It honors the internal struggle of men like Franklin who knew that their identity was tied to a specific European lineage, and it corrects the colonial alchemy that tried to turn diverse cultures into a single, colorless mass of power. To speak truthfully, we must name the origin. Only then can we understand the width and distance of the healing journey set before us.

I am repeating myself. Yet, I know repetition is necessary. I am watching the gears of a familiar machine grind with renewed, frantic energy, yet the silence coming from the porches and the breakrooms of average European Americans is deafening. I sit in the tension of the “now,” looking at neighbors who seem to be drowning in a tide of their own making, yet they refuse to acknowledge the water.

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Why? Because she disagreed with her father on the value and virtue of Donald J. Trump. Fearing that there was no convincing her otherwise, Kris Harrison murdered his daughter. Despite clear evidence of what he did, Daddy Harrison’s “community” refused to indict him and he lives with no consequences for his actions. His white community protected him for choosing to remain so loyal to whiteness, he sacrificed one of his children. Here is a link to the news story: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyk917xy8no

Here, manifested in the concrete is the abstract fear I have been told existed, but did not see the evidence thereof. Thousands of young people told me they were in danger of being murdered by their own family members if they chose to announce they were anti-racist/pro-humanity. It has taken me two months to wrap my head around this lesson because I can not obtain the glorified mental state of white racial innocence. I have to borrow something created by Dr. Carol Anderson, a brilliant Black historian and public policy analysis. In particular, for our studies, I am directing our focus on her third book, “White Rage,” published just as Mr. Trump ascends to the presidency in 2016.

The transition from the life of Lucy Harrison to the cold mechanics of policy is where we find the pulse of “white rage.” Dr. Carol Anderson’s thesis does not concern itself with the explosive, vitriolic outbursts of the “angry white man” in the street; rather, it examines the quiet, legislative, and systemic “rage” that functions as a barrier to progress whenever Black advancement threatens the status quo. To look at Harrison’s death is to see the physical manifestation of a theory that usually hides behind the mahogany desks of courtrooms and city councils.

​The Architecture of the Void

​When European Americans lament a “lack of community,” they are often mourning the ghost of a structure the Civil Rights Movement demanded they help dismantle themselves. In the mid-20th century, the European American “community” was defined by its exclusivity. The picket fence of segregation was not just a decoration: it was a border! When the Supreme Court and the threat of urban riots (see the 1967 Kerner Commission) forced those borders to become porous, the response was not the tortured growth demanded by integration, but an increasingly depressed withdrawal into self-protective isolation. [Click onto this PBS special entitled, “The Race Riot”: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/riot-report/]

​White rage, in Anderson’s framework, is the “invisible” reaction to Black presence. In the context of Lucy Harrison, we see the end result of “White Flight” and the subsequent starvation of urban infrastructure. When “white rage” has on where else to turn and release itself, it pours out against the very people it is seeking to save: white people.

The “community” that European Americans miss was often predicated on the political economy of segregation. Segregation made a colony out of Black spaces. Meaning, for white spaces to be white spaces, i.e. high-resource isolation called the suburbs—was financed by draining the lifeblood, tax base, and transit equity out of the spaces where Black bodies lived and died, i.e. the ghetto.

Because she chose to adhere to Dr. King’s dream of an integrated ideal, ​Lucy Harrison’s vulnerability was not an accident of fate; it was an achievement of design. She wasn’t murdered because she was young, although that is partly to blame, nor was it because she was a woman, although that, too, is partly to blame. She was murdered because the white supremacists around her (originally) perceived her as one of them and she refused their invitation into their “community.”

Lucy spent a childhood, literally, watching her boomer generation grandparents and Gen X parents systematically attack social services through the legislative process in order to separate white people from Black people. (Got Obama?!) When public transit is defunded, when healthcare becomes a luxury of the zip code, and when the safety net is shredded because “those people” might use it, the resulting vacuum is the very essence of white rage turned in on itself. It is the preference for a hollowed-out society over a shared, multicultural one.

​The Anatomy of the Theory

​Dr. Anderson argues that every significant step toward Black equality has been met with a calculated, legalistic strike meant to undermine that victory.

​The 1866 Thirteenth Amendment was met with Jim Crow culture and Black Codes.

​The 1954 Brown v. Board decision was met with “white citizens councils” and the shuttering of public schools.

​The 1965 Voting Rights Act was met with gerrymandering and restrictive ID laws.

​Harrison’s death sits at the intersection of these historical pivots. If the white community feels fractured, it is because the tools of communal thriving—education, infrastructure, and healthcare—were treated as zero-sum games. The “rage” is the refusal to allow a public good to exist if it must be shared with the “wrong” people.

​Deconstructing the Conservative Critique

​Critics from the conservative right often dismiss Anderson’s theory as “reverse racism” or “groupthink.” They argue that attributing systemic outcomes to “white rage” ignores individual agency and maligns an entire demographic. However, these critiques fail to hold water for three primary reasons:

​1. The Distinction Between Emotion and Policy

The most common error is the belief that “rage” implies a loud, emotional state. Anderson is clear: white rage is calm. It is bureaucratic. It works through the law. Calling it “racism” against white people is a category error; it is an analysis of power, not a judgment on souls. It examines how policies are crafted to protect white hegemony at the expense of social stability.

​2. The Evidence of the Results

​To call the theory “groupthink” is to ignore the data. When we look at the disparity in mortality rates, the lack of transit access for the working poor, and the hyper-segregation of American cities, we are looking at the receipts of a specific ideology. Lucy Harrison’s reality was shaped by decades of policy decisions—zoning, redlining, and austerity—that do not require every participant to “feel” racist; they only require the system to function as intended.

​3. The Myth of the “Individual”

​Conservatives argue for individual accountability, yet they ignore how the “individual” is hemmed in by the “collective” decisions of the past. One cannot act as a purely free agent when the bridge to the hospital is broken or the bus doesn’t run to the job site. Anderson’s theory isn’t about blaming every white individual; it is about identifying the mechanism that keeps the “community” broken for everyone, including those who think they are benefiting from the exclusion.

​The High Cost of the Wall

​When European Americans say they lack community, they are describing the loneliness of the fortress. By using “white rage” to block Black progress, the architects of these systems inadvertently created a world that is colder, more atomized, and more dangerous for the vulnerable—people like Lucy Harrison.

​The tragedy of Harrison’s death is the proof that white rage is a pyrrhic victory. It builds a wall to keep “the other” out, only to find that the wall also keeps the warmth of a true, functioning society from coming in. To understand her end is to understand that white people’s “lack of community” - outside of conformity to whiteness - is not a mystery; it is the bill coming due for centuries of organized exclusionary colonialism.

The question is: Can the historical price be paid without massive bloodshed? Can white people regain their humanity through emotional implosion, rather than physical explosion? Can they learn how to cry freedom, rather than rage against a machine of their own making?

​As a Black man, my reality begins where that luxury ends.

Monday, April 6, 2026 is RSA’s birthday. Please entertain the idea of upgrading to a PAID subscription. Each subscription helps fund crucial grassroots-level organizing!

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AS A BIRTHDAY PRESENT (April 6) TO THE AUTHOR, PLEASE CONSIDER BECOMING A PAID SUBSCRIBER!

Thanks to the pressures provided by this second Trump Administration and the refusal of Black, Brown and Indigenous people to be at the forefront of participation and leadership, 2026 has been defined by a peculiar phenomenon in the American sociopolitical landscape: a surge of European American-led “anti-racist” and “anti-ICE” mobilizations.

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