“Mommy, your skin is white and you are good to us… and other white people love us too…”

She looks at me, her eyes are filled with worry. I hope she doesn’t see me wince. Then a familiar ache fills my chest. It’s the pang that comes when my kids look to me for help with the anguish they meet around race.

I don’t have to teach her about whiteness, she already knows. At 7 years old, she’s aware of how race works in the US. How, in our culture, the worth of white people like me was grown and is preserved by devaluing and cheating those who look like her. Her short years have shown her that her humanity and worth are not a given, but are subjects for debate.

But, she also knows the goodness of the white people in her life. She is confident of the love and tenderness we’ve shown. She asks me, can whiteness be trusted? Can it be good?

I’ve wrestled with this too. It isn’t that I question my potential to do good and it’s not that I doubt whether white people generally have the capacity for it. Just like my 7 year old, my lived experience tells me that we do.

My query is rooted in the way power is structured and who gets access to resources. It’s situated in the how and why white was created as a racial category and in the stories we tell of whiteness. I’ve been trying to work out what to do with whiteness – a thing designed to exploit and exclude and something that I find myself tethered to.

Lately, too, I’m finding that I don’t need to ask whether whiteness can be good. Putting energy towards this kind of endeavor keeps me from the transformation I seek. I don’t need to redeem whiteness.

Let me back up. I know how to tell a story where white people are good. Who wants to be the bad guy, right? The grand narrative I’d developed about who I was in the world includes a story of virtuous whiteness.

I imagined myself, with my reddish hair and dramatically fair skin, possessing a strong Irish lineage. With little attention given to the entirety of my genetic ancestry, being Irish – coming from people who knew persecution at the hands of those with power – was a central part of the story I told about being white. It was a story of the underdog, of resistance and of overcoming. I pictured myself akin with luminaries such as abolitionist and Irish freedom fighter Daniel O’Connell.

My story of whiteness was about how I come from Quakers – some of the first white people to collectively stand for racial equality. I remember attending Quaker meetings with my great grandma and feeling struck by this remarkable community. Their version of togetherness vastly differed from the hierarchical structure and restrictive participation I met in other faith traditions. The Quakers first introduced me to the idea that God is equally for and in all people. I attached tenants of Quaker belief to principles and characteristics I saw in my family – they became part of my story of who we were. Because our God was for all, we were for all.

I am a child of the north. Born and raised in the north eastern region of the US. We northerners fought to end slavery and were a different sort of white people than the white people of the south. Even within my family, I sensed a distinction between our relatives who lived in the south and those of us from the north. I felt pride in this difference and it shaped how I storied our whiteness. I was kin to those who fought for the ideals of our democracy. We were the good white people.

It was a flawed story, it was my creation and it served a purpose – I needed my whiteness to be good. The good white person story that I wrote for myself was possible because it fit with a larger social narrative about the goodness of white skin. It’s a narrative that supports me cultivating a positive view of where I came from, who I am and what I can achieve. It’s a story that is woven throughout US history and culture.

At heart, though, maintaining this story came at an expense. I couldn’t reconcile what I’d witnessed of whiteness with what I’d told myself about my whiteness. In the telling and re-telling, I was blinded to the ways that my story and those of my people, did not match up with the structural realities of our world.

When confronted with the certainties of inequity and of whiteness, I was defensive, unable to take in new information or question what I held as truth. Most of my attempts to work against racial inequity ended up with me distracted by comparison – my energy spent on ensuring that I was not included among the troublesome white people. In the face of evidence that differed from my story about being a good white person, I clung to my fragmented truth.

My claim on Irish heritage left out how, because of our white skin, the Irish in America were granted entry to privilege and resources in ways that people of color aren’t. It didn’t include how white people give up pieces of who we are in order to fit whiteness. The bits of my story that leaned on faith and a Yankee upbringing, didn’t incorporate how racism and separation are present and shape all of communal life and locale in the US. My story lacked mutuality – it positioned me as spectator but not participant in the problem of racial inequity. It let me escape the pain I felt about being tied to whiteness.

This story let me believe that I’d figured out how to be white in a way that keeps to my values of wholeness, human worth and interconnectedness. Creating and sustaining a story about whiteness being good was a colossal waste of time and energy. In lieu of this, I wish that I would have done the work of being vulnerable about my connection to racial inequity and developed an accurate account of what my white skin means in the context of my country. I wish that I had learned to question the racial status quo rather than practicing how to defend it. I wish that I had learned accountability instead of creating a way for me to set aside the oppression of whiteness and offload responsibility onto others.

My story said, race was only important for some people and that whiteness was mostly inconsequential to my life’s course and understanding of who I am. But, my creation and preservation of a story about my whiteness, points to just how inescapable race is for me. Though often unacknowledged, race is an ever present part of our family story and of my unique story. Living in a country organized by race, will not let any one of us escape.

Even if I didn’t establish categories of race or purpose for white people to gain at the expense of others, for as long as I’m raced as white, I’m tied to how whiteness harms. Before I could begin to answer for whiteness, I had to release the need for my whiteness to be good. As this yearning dulls, I’m better able to resist the impulse to shield or justify whiteness. Whiteness never needed a defender anyway.

My hope is that I’ll remake my connection to whiteness so that it’s no longer about me being a good white person. I’ve found freedom in this. Being linked to whiteness doesn’t feel like a judgement or an attack against my person like it once did. It’s a statement of my social position. White is how my people fit into the larger story of race in my country. This small realization frees me up so that I can actually figure our how to be accountable and responsible.

What does that mean? Well, for today, it means that I no longer fool myself into believing that being a good white person is an effective response to racial inequity. I resist the trap of pursing a better whiteness and the message I’d learned that doing so supports my well-being. Instead, I push through the fear that I’ll get things wrong, accept that I’m going to mess up and take care as I do it anyway.