“I wish I knew what it’s like on the other side of white supremacy, and I’m saying this as a 6’4” Black man. To be part of a system that isn’t inherently against someone who looks like me. I don’t know, man, being black is all I’ve ever been or really known. To just look at all the history and tragedy that’s happened to people who literally look like me, and all that’s continuing to happen because of systems set in place against us — it just f— sucks. This ‘being white’ sh— must be nice. I can imagine it has some added comfort to life that I’ll simply never experience.” -UMass Boston undergraduate

After the election, the campus vibrated with fear, rage, sorrow, anguish, powerlessness, numbness, and disbelief at the wholehearted embrace of whiteness. A sea of white voters, including a majority of white women, secured these election results. People have voted against their families, histories, and interests in the name of whiteness for many decades, if not centuries.

Whiteness is contagious and doesn’t require the northern European ancestry that most often accompanies it. By “whiteness,” I mean the systems, structures, power dynamics, policies, technologies of violence, narratives, gestures, attitudes, positionalities, ways of being, ways of seeing, and sensibilities that perpetuate white supremacy, settler colonialism, white liberalism, and racial capitalism.

As a white woman, I am the face of the enemy, and many of you are as well. If we take responsibility for this, we can be part of the structure’s dismantling. Even if we didn’t cast votes for Trump, we didn’t do enough to stop this dangerous destructiveness. If you are already a dedicated ally then you are fully engaged in this relational work. If you are not yet an ally, but would like to be, you are surrounded by people who will encourage and support you in the process.

We were called in by Professor Tony Van Der Meer and Professor Keith Jones in 2020. They, and other colleagues, designed a 10-year plan for committing UMass Boston to becoming a leading anti-racist and health-promoting public research university; their tireless efforts won them the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Service.

However, when that plan was unexpectedly severed from its “anti-racist” and “health-promoting” goals, we didn’t organize and speak up, and rumors, silencing, and misinformation took hold. Had we stood in solidarity and fought for this plan, many more of us would have completed the Undoing Racism training with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond that they had called for and engaged more fully with the now-defunct Undoing Racism Assembly. These opportunities for engagement and growth would have gathered us together in community and dialogue, better equipping us to serve and support our students and colleagues in this perilous moment.

As we head into a second Trump presidency, we need to reckon with our untrustworthiness as allies and lay the groundwork for the possibility of repair and reconnection on campus and beyond, recommitting to the values we now need to rebuild trust and reimagine community, solidarity, and justice.

In this country, whiteness is an unrelenting, seductive whisper. It says we need not concern ourselves; it’s business as usual. Whiteness says we can’t relate to other people’s struggles; we have nothing in common; doing for yourself and your family is enough; we have nothing else to share or give. Whiteness is the myth of “me,” the notion that “me” can exist outside of a collective “we.” We did it on our own steam; we did it the right way.

Whiteness shames. Whiteness sells. Whiteness excuses inaction because it’s complicated, and it says that we don’t have enough information. Whiteness positions us to focus on our own comfort and happiness and to avert our eyes when we confront the suffering of others. Whiteness tells us to center our class interests or our class aspirations; that our stuff needs protecting; that we deserve more—even though we have already received more generationally for no other reason than the privileges that whiteness affords.

Whiteness is normal, neutral, standard, and common sense. Whiteness says, “Thank goodness we live in a blue state,” and “At least we are protected from many of the impacts here.” Who is this “we”? Whiteness ensures that history is “whitewashed,” and it discourages the active seeking of more accurate, multi-voiced histories and suppresses the histories of liberation of subordinated and oppressed peoples. Many people were shocked that women voted for a misogynist convicted of sexual assault who further threatens reproductive rights, but whiteness trumps bodily autonomy. Whiteness not only makes people invisible but obscures the very process by which it operates.

In public, whiteness takes the form of funding genocide, mass incarceration, and other forms of dehumanizing state violence; police officers exonerated after murdering unarmed Black people; land theft; anti-Blackness; Islamophobia; Asian hate; erasure; traumatic family separations; anti-immigration detention and deportation processes; violence against the LGBTQ+ community; our expanding wealth gap; the patriarchy; and attempts to control and surveil information, bodies, and identities. At UMass Boston, it takes the form of a restrictive space-use policy, a hierarchical power structure that refuses to examine the historic effects of structural racism, lack of representation, absence of shared governance, and a litigious and hostile environment that discourages belonging, equity, collective bargaining, and restorative justice.

Contending with whiteness must be enacted as a daily practice. It requires honest assessment, genuine accountability, and authentic commitment. Recognizing and acknowledging complicity is a process that requires a hard look at what was, what is, and what will be until we refuse the way whiteness arranges what we think, what we do, and what we can imagine.

This moment calls for more than performative, promotional displays of anti-racism and health promotion, or of wellness and inclusion. There is hope and healing in collectively doing the work to reimagine who the “we” is both as a campus and as a society. Let’s do the hard and difficult work collectively to release ourselves from the grip whiteness has upon our bodies and our minds, so that we can free ourselves to embrace one another and co-create a campus and a world no longer under the violent and destructive spell of whiteness.

This article appeared in print on Page 7 of Vol. LVIII Issue VII, published Nov. 18, 2024.