During a recent presentation on whiteness and culture, I found myself pausing mid-sentence, aware of something stirring beneath the surface. I had been speaking about the culture of whiteness — its formation, its function, its consequences — and I suddenly realized that, for many in the room, this could easily land as an abstract concept. A historical curiosity. An intellectual frame. But what I was really reaching for was far more personal and transformative: an invitation to remake something many of us have held as a fixed truth about ourselves.

If we have lived for decades identifying as “white,” what does it mean to question that? What would it mean not only to critique whiteness as a system but to disinvest from it as a personal identity?

The term white is not a cultural inheritance. It is not an ancient lineage or a set of shared traditions. It is a construct — a category born in service of power, hierarchy, and separation. It was designed to obscure the vast array of histories, languages, lifeways, and relationships that existed long before it, folding them into a single, flattened identity that served a particular social order.

And yet, many of us have internalized that word as who we are. We have built our sense of self around it. We have been taught that it is neutral, natural, inevitable.

But what happens if we peel it back? What if, instead of accepting “white” as the sum of who we are, we ask what lives underneath it?

Beneath that label are lands and lineages, stories and songs, practices of tending to earth and to one another. Beneath it are the people our ancestors were before they were invited — or coerced — into “whiteness.” And reclaiming those deeper stories is not about nostalgia or purity; it’s about wholeness. It’s about remembering that “white” was never meant to nourish us. It was meant to separate us — from each other, from the land, from our ancestral wisdom, and from ourselves.

We are not bound to it. We can choose to step away from “white” as an identity. We can reclaim the fullness of our human inheritance. We can do the slow, careful work of remembering who our people actually are and how they lived — and let that knowledge reshape how we understand ourselves and how we show up in the world.

Here is my invitation: begin this work. However imperfectly, however tentatively — begin. Trace your lineage back beyond the label. Learn the names of the places your ancestors came from. Listen for the values, the stories, the ways of tending that may still live in your family’s memory. Talk with elders. Read, travel, ask questions. And then bring what you find into conversation — with your friends, your communities, your children.

The journey away from whiteness and back toward the fullness of our humanity is not simple or quick. But it is possible. It is already happening. And each small step you take toward deeper truth helps weave the world we most long to inhabit.

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