By Carla Thomas
The Truth Contributor
Racism. I’m so tired of it. Tired of the hate. Tired of the gaslighting. Tired of being expected to act like this country doesn’t run on a system that was never meant to include us.
Black people: we didn’t start racism, and we cannot be expected to end it. That burden belongs to those who created it and still benefit from it. Now breathe.
Our work is different. It’s reclaiming our power by protecting our communities. Building power. Creating unity. Strengthening what’s ours so we can address racism from a place of strategy, not survival.
For too long, we’ve been made to believe that if we just do a little more, speak more softly, protest more peacefully, dress more “respectably,” or discipline our communities harder, then maybe, just maybe, racism will loosen its grip. HA!
Racism is not a Black people problem. It never was. It’s a system created by white people to preserve power, wealth, and dominance. The responsibility for dismantling it rests with those who built it and continue to benefit from it.
Yes, we can and should call it out when it shows up in our lives. We have every right to speak truth to power and defend our communities. But ending racism? Nope. That’s not our role. It’s not our responsibility to fix what we didn’t break.
We need to stop exhausting ourselves trying to ease white guilt or prove we’re worthy of their understanding. That’s not our burden to carry.
Whiteness Was Invented to Divide and Conquer
To understand our current reality, we have to understand where whiteness, and this system came from. “Whiteness” itself is a fabricated identity born not out of shared culture or heritage, but from colonization and control. In the 17th century, in places like colonial Virginia, European elites began unifying various ethnic groups (English, Irish, German, etc.) under a new umbrella term: “white.” This wasn’t about solidarity, it was about hierarchy. “Whiteness” became a tool to divide the working class and to justify the enslavement of Africans. As journalist Robert P. Baird explains in The New Yorker, this racial category was deliberately constructed in response to events like Bacon’s Rebellion, to prevent unity between poor Black and white laborers. It’s not a race. It’s a strategy.
Dog Whistles and False Equivalencies: Respectability Won’t Save Us
Yet despite knowing this, Black people are still saying things like: “How can we expect them to stop killing us if we don’t stop killing us?”
This dangerous logic reinforces a false equivalency: when two vastly different things are treated as if they’re the same. In this case, it falsely equates community-based violence among Black people (which is rooted in systemic oppression) with the targeted violence of white supremacy. But white supremacy isn’t reacting to our behavior, it’s the very force that created the conditions for that behavior: through redlining, underfunded schools, job discrimination, mass incarceration, and decades of systemic neglect.
When people use the phrase “Black-on-Black crime” as a way to derail conversations about racism, they’re not offering solutions, they’re using a dog whistle: a coded term that sounds neutral but is meant to reinforce racist ideas. Violence happens most within communities because of proximity, not because of race. White people harm other white people too, but we never call it “white-on-white crime.” See how that works?
This whole mindset that we can “earn” safety or acceptance if we just “act right,” is a lie.
Liberation isn’t something we get by behavior. It comes from standing in our dignity, letting go of respectability politics, and reminding ourselves: we don’t need to prove our humanity. We were never the problem.
As civil rights leader John Lewis said in Walking with the Wind, and as bell hooks quotes:
“As far as I’m concerned, this was the turning point of the civil rights movement. … We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.”
This realization that we can do everything “right” and still be denied basic humanity, must shape how we understand our role in this struggle.
Why Is Everything Always About Race? Because It Always Has Been
Why is everything about race? Because racists made it so. This question is rarely sincere. It usually shows up as a deflection, thrown out when a Black person names racism for what it is. It’s a way to dismiss the truth, protect comfort, and avoid accountability in a system built on racial inequality.
Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for jogging while Black. Elijah McClain, a gentle, autistic young man in Colorado, was stopped, brutalized, and later killed by police while walking home from the store. Christian Cooper, an avid birdwatcher, had the police called on him in Central Park because a white woman weaponized his Blackness against him when asked to leash her dog. Even something as simple as opening a bookstore like Blacklit, owned by LaTasha Lewis in Dallas, Texas invites harassment, protests and surveillance, simply because the owner is Black. After just two years in business, she was forced to close her doors due to relentless backlash and targeted opposition.
None of these events were about what the people were “doing.” These people were attacked for who they were. So when people ask, “why is everything always about race?” the answer is clear: because in this country, Blackness is always being policed, surveilled, questioned, and threatened. Period.
The real question isn’t why everything is about race, it’s why people are treated differently because of their race, forcing these conversations to exist in the first place.
Living in a World Built Against Us: What Real Allyship Requires
To the white people who pride themselves on having Black friends, attending a Juneteenth festival, sitting on the boards or being a part of Black organizations: what are you doing when no one’s watching? It’s not enough to be near Blackness, you have to confront whiteness. That is, if you call yourself an ally.
This is where proximity politics falls apart: the idea that simply being close to a marginalized group through relationships, friendships, work environments, or cultural involvement, is enough to claim allyship. Some white people pride themselves on being in close proximity to Blackness. They will date Black people but won’t challenge racism in their own families; raise Black children but never confront the anti-Blackness embedded in their parenting, families or schools; work in Black spaces but refuse to examine their own privilege and biases.
They show up in selfies and photo ops, but never in fights. Comfortable around Blackness, but uncomfortable confronting whiteness. They believe proximity equals solidarity all the while quietly basking in the privileges that white supremacy affords them. They love the culture, the connection, the community, but they don’t examine how their whiteness still shields them, still centers them, still grants them access and power we’re denied.
This is passive supremacy, the quiet comfort of being near Blackness without ever challenging the systems that keep whiteness in control. It’s not overt hatred, but it’s not harmless either. It’s a refusal to risk the safety, status, or silence that comes with whiteness, even while claiming solidarity. Proximity is not proof of progress if you’re still invested in a system that dehumanizes the very people you claim to love.
That means challenging your family at the dinner table. It means calling out your coworkers when they make a “joke.” It means doing the unglamorous, uncomfortable work of unlearning your own internalized supremacy and actively working to dismantle it in your communities.
Anti-Blackness isn’t just about racial slurs and hate crimes, it shows up in the everyday, in ways people have learned to ignore. It lives in hiring practices. In school curricula. In newsrooms. In medical care. In jury selection. In neighborhoods. And yes, even in your homes. So if you’re not actively tearing it down, ask yourself: what are you actually doing? Because comfort is not commitment. And proximity is not solidarity.
This Is Not the End But a Redirect
It’s time we stop trying to conform, accommodate every demand, dispel every stereotype, or meet every unreasonable expectation placed on us. If we’re supposed to be created equal, why are we still chasing goalposts that never stop moving? The truth is: we will never be “right” enough for a system that’s functioning exactly as it was designed to.
History has proven it, no matter how well we speak, how much we achieve, or how many barriers we break. We can earn rights and privileges. We can succeed. We can even become President of the United States. And still, racism persists.
Instead of trying to dismantle racism, we focus on building what’s ours:
- Strengthening our communities
- Unifying across differences that divide us
- Unlearning internalized oppression
- Telling our stories and reclaiming our narratives
- Building economic power and ownership
- Creating systems of protection and support
- Confronting racism strategically, not just emotionally
We can’t fix a system that is functioning as intended, but we can prepare ourselves to face it with clarity, unity, purpose and power.