Letting Go of White Innocence

White people, it’s time to be honest about our addiction to white innocence.

I’ve been revisiting Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America, which was published just a few days before President Trump’s first inauguration.

For those who benefit from white privilege, Dr. Dyson’s words may be difficult to hear. But his insights speak to our current moment with a powerful, chilling precision.

Dyson describes an America wounded by White people's anger, which propelled Trump into the White House in 2017. Some of us may feel ashamed and embarrassed for how we have treated Black Americans, but “whiteness grows more shameless, more cruel, more uncaring by the day.”

How is this possible?

“Whiteness has only two modes: it either converts or destroys,” Dr. Dyson explains. “The only way to save our nation, and yes, to save yourselves, is to let go of whiteness and the vision of America it supports.”

If white Americans want to be true siblings in the struggle for freedom and justice, we must confront the lie of our neutrality.

Dyson preaches about how we as white folx can move beyond our racialized grief: “Beloved, your white innocence is a burden to you, a burden to the nation, a burden to our progress. It is time to let it go, to let it die in the place of the black bodies it wills into nonbeing.”

ID: Ku Klux Klan members in Washington, D.C., in 1925. Image credit: Bettmann/Getty