White People Won’t Dismantle White Supremacy—Until It We Understand it Poses a Threat to Us
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By: Lisa M. Hayes
White people will never take down white supremacy because it’s the right thing to do. Morality has never been the battleground where systems of power are overthrown. Not in this country, not in this world.
White people, as a collective, will only move against white supremacy when we perceive it as a direct threat to our own survival, to our comfort, our own way of life.
Here is the truth no one wants to admit: it already is.
White supremacy isn’t just a blight on Black and brown lives. It isn’t just the weight pressing down on marginalized communities, the invisible force shortening lifespans, closing doors, and keeping bootstraps forever out of reach.
White supremacy is an engine of destruction for white people too, and if we were willing to look past our delusions of supremacy, we would see it. But we don’t.
Whiteness, as a system, doesn’t teach white people to recognize danger until it’s inside our own house, eating our food, poisoning our children – and even then, as history is proving now, white supremacy keeps most white folks in a choke hold of delusion.
White Supremacy Isn’t Designed to Protect White People—It’s Designed to Control Us—Just Like Everyone Else
White people love to believe that white supremacy protects us, that it is a system designed for our benefit, a fortress keeping us safe.
It isn’t. It never was. White supremacy is an economic and political project that benefits the ruling class and keeps everyone else—yes, even white people—docile and obedient.
The same system that tells white people we are naturally superior also tells us that they don’t need labor unions,
that we don’t need universal healthcare,
that we don’t need to stand in solidarity with anyone—because our whiteness will keep us safe –
– yet, we die drowning in medical debt.
We work three jobs to afford what our parents had with one.
We fall victim to a system that convinces us that our enemies are black and brown, when in reality, our enemy is the very system we uphold.
Do we see it? No. Because whiteness is a death pact, not a benefit package.
History Screams the Warning, But White People Cover Our Ears
Every empire that has been built on domination and exploitation eventually turns on its own. That’s the trajectory of every violent, supremacist system in history.
Nazi Germany didn’t just murder Jewish people—it turned on its own citizens, executing political dissidents,
disabled people,
and the “undesirable” poor.
Apartheid didn’t just brutalize Black South Africans—it left white South Africans in a state of economic rot, exiled and hollowed out by their own history.
White America is no different. The same police state that brutalizes Black and brown communities will eventually brutalize white communities that no longer serve its interests.
The same economic system that wants to gut Black wealth is coming for white wealth now.
But white people won’t move against it until the pain is unbearable, until we can see our own suffering reflected back at us, probably until it is too late.
White People Don’t Want to Be Free—They Want to Be on Top
The deepest sickness of whiteness isn’t just that it oppresses—it’s that it robs white people of the ability to imagine a world without hierarchy.
Most progressive, well-intentioned white people aren’t fighting for liberation. They’re fighting for a kinder version of white supremacy, a softer landing, a system that doesn’t make them feel guilty while still keeping them on top.
That’s why white people only address racism when it threatens our comfort. That’s why uprisings only matter when cities burn, when profit margins suffer, when the threat of true revolution looms large.
We will never fight for justice because it is right. We will fight for it only when injustice costs us something – and it’s getting real expensive right now.
White Supremacy Is a Slow Suicide
If white people had any sense of self-preservation, we would dismantle white supremacy today. Not out of altruism. Not out of morality. But because it is a system built to consume us in the end.
It is a system that thrives on division and is dividing us. It is a system that devalues human life, will eventually – maybe right now, actively, in real-time, devaluing all lives, even white lives —
— so, maybe it is time for the “all lives matter” battalion to please stand up because we are all standing at the feet of the gallows today.
Lisa Hayes is a life coach, writer, and editor of Confluence Daily, specializing in social issues, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico and runs a life coach training program called The Coaching Guild.
