What is whiteness? It’s hard for me to define. Especially since most of my racial learning, as a white person in the US, meant mastering ways to ignore it.

So far, the best answer I can give is that whiteness is not me. Nor any other single white person. Whiteness is a construct with social consequences. Whiteness is big. It is a culture, a way of being, practices, expectations, attitudes and beliefs. Whiteness is about messages, shared meaning and common understanding.

Though it is outside of me, whiteness influences me profoundly. I struggle to recognize when and how whiteness gets the best of me. Sometimes whiteness is so familiar it feels a part of who I am – essential to my very being. Whiteness can and does influence the whole of me; physically, mentally, relationally, emotionally and spiritually.

Whiteness comes with history. It was created with purpose; constructed to confirm and preserve a social practice of othering and granting worth according to skin color. Whiteness is a strategy of power and the force propelling racism.

Whiteness works to undermine who I’m trying to become – it gets me to go against my own values, hopes and preferred ways of being. Daily I question how whiteness could be trying to overtake me – an everyday exercise for resisting whiteness; a habit that helps me better understand how race influences me.

Recently, this manner of questioning helped me understand my reaction to an important event. My faith community held an evening of worship for people of color. While the intention and meaning of the event was for the community as a whole, as a white person, this event was not for me to attend. It was about our identity and shared values – how we are people who stand against marginalization, resource conglomeration and dominance over others. I am excited to be a part of this community who, doesn’t simply proclaim our values, but also lives them. I feel belonging here. It’s a place and a people where the joint principles align with my own values, hopes and pursuit of how I desire to be.

At the same time I felt excited, I also felt sad. This feeling, this reaction didn’t make sense. Why sadness? I long to be a person that makes space and, in word and action, stands on the side of love. A person who persistently looks for and turns away from the ways I contribute inequity, un-kindness and un-love. Someone who hears and responds to the needs of others. I was in 100% agreement that such an evening was necessary and beneficial. I wanted my children and my husband (who are not white) to attend. If this event and this community aligned so well with my values, hopes and dreams, why did I feel sadness?

Enter my friend whiteness. Whiteness would say the sadness was about me – that I was sad because I was being excluded. This fits with whiteness as I’ve come to know it. A way that says, as a white person, space is mine to take and that whiteness should be welcomed. Whiteness tries to convince me that when I am asked to make space for others that I am being left out. That something of mine is being taken from me and that I am being harmed.

I wasn’t sad about being excluded, because I was not being excluded. My participation was very welcome – it’s just that the way I was asked to join in does not jell with what whiteness taught me. My faith community provides generous and loving space for people to practice stepping outside of the expectations, pressures and roles that weigh on us; we are all invited to step into abundance, life and love. That’s what this event gave to me – a chance to let go of the constraints of whiteness; an opportunity to know acceptance and connection different from the belonging that I’ve known in whiteness. It was an opening for me to be other than what I’ve been – to imagine and to be other than what whiteness prescribes.

It helped me to see that the story whiteness tells is just one option – for the sadness I felt that day and for everyday after. But it is a familiar narrative, one that locates blame in others and helps me avoid seeing whiteness and the effects of it in our world. Though whiteness is what I know and though I could easily find other white people to support a story of white exclusion, I don’t need to accept the story whiteness would tell about the sadness I felt. Whiteness, in fact, was the cause of it.

I’m sad that we continue to live in a reality where whiteness has power to trounce, to exclude and to harm. This event is just one of many that brings our racial reality into sharp focus. That whiteness works against our multi-raced family and habitually harms me, my spouse and my kids is tragic – and sadness is a suitable response (so is rage but that’s for another time). It’s an existence where whiteness seeks to sustain a system that violates what I stand for. I’m sad because I often feel helpless in the face of such a powerful and inequitable order. I feel sadness because I, too often, participate in upholding, rather than upending, whiteness. Sadness overwhelms me when I’m reminded that whiteness sustains an atmosphere that necessitates people of color, including some of those most dear to me, seek respite from it’s relentless persecution, so they can survive it’s ferocity.

Oppressive forces – like whiteness – evolve and change to fit the time and to continue their purpose. I too am learning to adapt. As I come to know more about how whiteness is not an essential part of my being but a social construct, then I can change whiteness and the ways I relate to it. When I am able to see whiteness as separate from my humanity and understand that ending whiteness will not end me, then I am able to deconstruct the whiteness that’s been working in and through me. I’m scrutinizing my relationship with whiteness because it gets in the way of me living and loving to the fullest. Whiteness, as I’ve come to know it, is the definition of what I don’t want to be.