White People Want to be Judged By Their Intentions and This is Why We are Sinking into Fascism
Reading Time: 3 minutes
By Lisa Hayes for Confluence Daily
Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
White people love to talk about intentions.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“That’s not what I was trying to do.”
“I have a good heart.”
“I’m not racist, I just didn’t know.”
And there it is—
the holy grail of whiteness:
To be judged not by what we do,
but by what we meant to do.
We expect to be given the benefit of the doubt,
to center our innocence,
our confusion,
our comfort—
every time harm is named.
But the truth is this:
We do not get to claim moral high ground
from the depths of our own unexamined psyche.
We do not get to build our character on good intentions
when we’ve never interrogated the source of those intentions.
Because if we haven’t done the work to understand what shaped us—
our whiteness, our power, our proximity to harm—
then our intentions aren’t innocent.
They’re inherited.
They are reflexes passed down from a system
designed to let us feel good while doing harm.
And when we insist on being judged by those intentions,
instead of our behavior and its impact,
we do something dangerous.
We protect ourselves.
And in protecting ourselves,
we protect the very systems that built us.
We can have good intentions and still be complicit in fascism.
We can believe in kindness
and still uphold systems built on cruelty.
We can think of ourselves as good people
and still be the reason someone else is afraid.
White people with good intentions
have become the soft cover under which hard power grows.
Because when we refuse to face our role,
when we refuse to risk our safety,
when we prioritize being seen as good
over being willing to disrupt—
we clear the path for fascism to bloom.
It is not enough to be non-racist.
It is not enough to be shocked.
It is not enough to be sad.
If we haven’t taken risks,
if we haven’t lost comfort,
if we haven’t been willing to rupture relationships,
to make things messy,
to be misunderstood while speaking truth—
we are not resisting.
We are preserving.
Fascism feeds on silence.
On passivity.
On self-protection wrapped in performative allyship.
And let’s be honest—
we didn’t take racism seriously.
And now we don’t know how to take fascism seriously.
Because if we had done the work of dismantling the first,
we’d recognize the second.
We’d feel it in our bones.
We’d be standing in front of it now—burning our comfort to the ground.
But instead, too many of us are still asking for grace.
Still asking to be seen as one of the good ones.
Still asking to be safe.
Let’s be clear:
The world is not burning because of monsters.
It’s burning because too many of us stayed quiet.
Because too many of us believed that meaning well was enough.
That feeling bad was change.
That guilt was the same as action.
It isn’t.
Our guilt does nothing.
Our silence does damage.
And our unwillingness to examine our intentions
has cost more than we’ll ever know.
If we want to be on the right side of history,
we have to stop defending our hearts
and start defending humanity.
Not with hashtags.
Not with platitudes.
But with risk.
With rupture.
With relentless accountability.
And with the deep, painful, unending work
of unlearning what whiteness has taught us to believe about ourselves.
Our intentions are not the story.
Our actions are.
And the story we’re living now
was written by those of us who refused to read the fine print.
It’s time to start telling a different one.
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.
