Dear White Kids.

Uncovering the whitewashed lies you were sold.

Come sit with me for a minute.

I’m not your mother. But I am a mother, a white mother, and I need to say some things that your parents probably never said to you. That most white parents never say to their kids. That I am saying now because the silence has gone on long enough and someone has to break it.

So here I am, breaking it.

Some of this will be uncomfortable. Some of it might make you want to quit reading. I’m asking you not to, because you are capable of hard things, even if nobody ever told you that this particular hard thing was yours to do.

It is. It always has been.

Here we go.

Photo by pawel szvmanski

The Lie of Colorblindness

You were probably taught by your parents, your school, maybe your church —definitely your culture— that the goal is not to see color. That the kind thing, the right thing, is to treat everyone the same, as if race simply doesn’t exist. I understand why that felt true. It came from somewhere that wanted to be good. But it was wrong, and somebody should have told you.

Colorblindness doesn’t heal racism.

It just lets the person practicing it feel innocent while racism keeps running in the background, doing exactly what it was designed to do. When a white person says, I don’t see color, what they almost always mean is, I don’t want to see what color means in this country, because seeing it means I have to do something about it. That’s not kindness. That’s looking away and calling it goodness.

Color is real. Race as biology is largely a fiction — a story that rich white people invented to justify a hierarchy they intended to keep. But the consequences of that story are not fiction at all. They are in who gets pulled over by the police. Who gets hired by that dream job. Who gets believed in a courtroom, a classroom, a hospital room. Who gets to be tired without being called lazy. Who gets to be angry without being called dangerous. Who gets to walk into a room and be seen as a full human being before anything else.

Seeing color means seeing history.

It means seeing the person in front of you, really totally seeing them, including the world they’ve had to move through just to get here. That’s not something to be afraid of. You’re just paying attention. It’s past time we started paying attention.

The Inheritance You Didn’t Ask For

Stay with me here, because this is the part that most white parents skip entirely — usually because they haven’t reckoned with it themselves. Yes. You did not choose to be white. You did not personally build slavery, or redlining, or the school-to-prison pipeline, or any of the machinery that shaped the world you were born into. That is true, and I’m not asking you to carry guilt for any of it. But, you do benefit from it. Every day. Whether you know it or not, whether you want to or not.

Inheritance works whether you accept it or not. You didn’t ask for the advantage any more than a child asks to be born into wealth. But you still grow up in that house. You still move through a world built to receive you differently than it receives people who don’t look like you.

White supremacy is not only men in hoods.

It’s imperative to understand that, because white people have made a very comfortable peace with themselves by deciding that racism looks like monsters and since they don’t look like monsters, they must be fine. It’s also in your name reading as trustworthy on a resume. It’s in driving through any neighborhood without being watched. It’s in the teacher who never questioned whether you belonged. It’s in the store where nobody followed you. It’s in a hundred invisible moments so ordinary you may have moved through your whole life without noticing them… because that’s exactly how privilege works. You only notice the water when you’re the one who doesn’t have enough of it.

Guilt is not what I’m asking for.

Guilt turns inward and sits there waiting to be soothed, and it doesn’t do a damn thing for anyone. What I’m asking for is responsibility. The willingness to look at what’s true and decide what kind of person you’re going to be inside of it. That’s the ask. It’s a big one. You’re big enough for it.

What Allyship Actually Is

Let’s talk about what it actually means to show up, because the word ally has been stretched and softened and performed until it barely means anything anymore. Allyship is not a feeling. It is not the right opinions, the right posts, the right things to say in rooms full of people who already agree with you. Those things are fine. They cost nothing. And things that cost nothing don’t change anything.

Real allyship is a practice.

It’s repetitive and uncomfortable and it mostly happens when nobody’s watching and there’s no applause for it. That’s how you know it’s the real thing. It means speaking up where it costs you something. Not to your already-convinced friends, but to your asshole uncle at the dinner table, your coworker who just said something racist or misogynistic, the group chat where someone made a joke and you felt something tighten in your chest and you said nothing because it was easier. Didn’t want to open a can of worms or ruffle any feathers. I know that moment. Most white people know that moment.

Say something next time.

It gets easier every time you speak up, and even when it doesn’t, you say it anyway because it’s right. It means following the lead of people of color, observing and educating yourself and not expecting them to spoon feed you the answers or coddle you with validation. Listening more than you talk. Not centering your discomfort in a conversation about someone else’s pain. Accepting correction without making your feelings about being corrected into the whole story. It means doing your own homework. The books exist. Google exists. The films exist. The essays, the testimonies, the history — all of it is there, freely available, written by people who lived it.

You do not get to wait for someone already exhausted from navigating racism to stop and explain it to you from scratch. That is not their job. It never was.

You will get things wrong.

We all do. When you do, apologize cleanly, correct course, and keep going. Don’t perform your remorse. Don’t make your mistake the center of the story. That’s just another way of making it about you. Allyship is not a credential you earn once and carry forever. It’s a choice you make over and over, in small moments, for the rest of your life. You are capable of that. Even if nobody ever told you it was required of you.

It is.

Racism and Misogyny Are the Same Machine

One more thing, and this one I need you to really hold onto. White supremacy and patriarchy were not built separately. They were constructed together, by the same hands, for the same purpose — to establish a hierarchy that sorted human beings by race and by gender and assigned worth accordingly. They share logic. They share language. They reinforce each other. You cannot dismantle one while leaving the other intact.

If you have ever felt what it is to be dismissed because of your body, to have your anger labeled irrational, to be doubted in a room where others were simply believed — then you have a door into understanding what racism does. Not the same experience. Not equivalent pain. But the same architecture. The same machinery, grinding in the same direction, against different people. Which means you cannot fight one and ignore the other.

A feminism that doesn’t center women of color is not feminism.

It is white women wanting access to power, which is not liberation. It’s a reshuffling of who gets to be on top, and it leaves most women exactly where they were. Black women, Indigenous women, Latinas, Asian women, trans women of color — they are at the center of every movement that has ever moved anything in this country. They have organized, marched, bled, and built.

They have also been the most disbelieved, the most unprotected, the most exhausted, and the most erased from the history of the very movements they sustained.

If your care doesn’t start there, it hasn’t really started. Look at who’s not in the room. Look at who’s in the room but not being heard. That is always where the work is. Every single time.

White parents failed you by staying quiet. We handed you a comfortable story, and we left you unprepared for the truth of the world and your place in it. That was not protection. That was cowardice pretending to be kindness.

You deserved this conversation years ago. You’re getting it now. You were handed a story with thousands of pieces missing. That is not your fault. But you are adept to go looking for the missing pieces. To sit with them honestly. To let them change how you move through the world. Not with guilt. With responsibility. With your eyes open and your mouth ready to say the thing that needs saying, even when it’s hard, even when nobody’s watching, and it must cost you something. It costs comfort. It costs silence. It costs the easy version of yourself.

That is what we should have been teaching you all along.