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The Price of White Privilege is the Suffering of People of Color - We Have a Massive Debt to Pay [1]

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Date: 2025-09-10

I’ve had this brewing inside me for a while now, but haven't really been able to properly express it.

However, the time is coming soon when we are going to have to reckon yet again with our White skinfolk about the legacy of our bigotry and refusal to address it. We have failed at this conversation every time it has come up for us as a nation, because we prioritize the feelings and camaraderie of our fellow Whites over the basic humanity of the rest of the nation.

Now more than ever we are close to the point of actually having that conversation. It’s no surprise at the same time our nation is closer than ever to its demise as a free nation in any sense of the word, let alone the actual version we have always aspired to but never reached. If, as Lincoln said, we must either endure forever or die by suicide then White Privilege is the poisonous drug we will kill ourselves with if we do not swear it off for good.

That means something a lot of us have avoided for decades: calling out our fellow Whites, no matter the cost.

Every time we as a nation have tried to reckon with this, Whites immediately abandon the rest of the country as soon as the going gets tough: Reconstruction saw a brief blossoming of Black leadership and growth, and we surrendered to Confederate sore losers (that were pardoned first for their insurrection); the Civil Rights Movement saw a great leap forward in legislation, and by the Reagan era White Americans were already well on their way to rolling back or defanging much of those efforts; and then we elected the first Black president, a truly momentous achievement that could have heralded a new age of racial harmony in America; but then the party failed to unite behind him and thus killed most of his agenda in the cradle, causing the country to abandon him and Whites in particular to spend the next 17 years throwing the angriest, vilest, most racist temper tantrum they could muster, capping it off with another insurrection (and pardons for those who did it) and the most racist and ignorant White man ever elevated to higher office.

Every time we stand up for the whole country, even in the most tepid manner, our fellow Whites rise up and inflict every humiliation they can on the country to try and undermine those achievements, turn back the clock, and intimidate the forces of progress into submission.

And we permit it, time and again, because of the most inane reasons: they’re our neighbors, our friends, our family, we go to school and church and family functions with them. They’re not ALL bad people, just...complicated.

Even here on Daily Kos, I’ve had arguments with people defending their Republican neighbors, relatives, and fellow congregants as fundamentally mostly good people.

Well, it’s time to face facts: they’re not. Look at who they’ve elevated to power. Look around you: we are in a state careening into authoritarianism, with masked thugs yanking people off the street without cause or due process, even fellow citizens.

It’s just not White people they’re doing it to. Yet. Where is the outrage from the right over this? Where is the anger and fury of your so-called “decent” neighbors and church-goers?

They condone this, they approve of it, their passive acceptance is complicity. They’re fine with a White Christian ethnostate and theocracy. That’s what they’ve always wanted anyway.

And while we ambivalently bicker and argue about whether or not Gavin Newsom’s tweets are funny or a bad idea, or discuss which front-runner for 2028 we like the most (fucking really, people? It’s not even 2027 yet), American citizens are being deported with their non-citizen parents; American citizens are being hauled off the streets based on their looks; Americans are seeing armed soldiers stomping through their streets.

Fascism in America is already here if you’re brown.

Very soon, we will have perhaps our last chance to wrest back power from them. We will once again, if we truly don’t self-sabotage in 2026 and follow the great Democratic Party tradition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, be in power and have the goodwill of a nation behind us.

We cannot squander it with more triangulation, lofty speeches about reconciliation and “the better angels of our nature”, and eagerly attempt to put it all behind us.

There is too much blood on our hands now for that. Never again can we trust these regressives to make peace and move on. We cannot do the same thing we did after W. Bush and allow them to meekly pretend they never said and did or voted for what they said, did, and voted.

There must be investigations. There must be prison sentences. There must be disowning of relatives and shunning of people. There must be a consequence, however painful for all of us, inflicted on those who tried so mightily to end the American Experiment once and for all.

We owe it to the millions of People of Color we have slaughtered and oppressed over the centuries so their blood and tears could lubricate the machinery of our comfort and success.

This is not about retribution, this is about justice. For once, we cannot deny justice on the grounds that we are sympathetic to and love the perpetrators. That is the ultimate act of selfish White Privilege, which we have done again and again: to trade the lives and futures of the rest of the country to shield ourselves from the worst of our abuses and transgressions so we don’t have to endure the discomfort of punishing people we like.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/10/2342736/-The-Price-of-White-Privilege-is-the-Suffering-of-People-of-Color-We-Have-a-Massive-Debt-to-Pay?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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