The Empty Trauma of Whiteness: How Colonialism Stole Europe’s Soul

Christian ZacaTecho Ortiz

Whiteness as a Wound

Oye, mira.

I am going to reframe a lie we've been conditioned to believe. People racialized as white aren't the colonizer. They too have been colonized, and we've got to talk about it.

Whiteness is not an identity. It is not a culture. It is not a lineage. Whiteness is a wound, a system engineered as a replacement for culture when empire needed bodies to enforce its rule. To understand racial trauma in white people today, we must stop pretending whiteness is simply privilege. Privilege exists, yes, but underneath it lies grief. Underneath the wealth of whiteness is a poverty of memory. White people were not born into belonging. They were born into an extraction machine that demanded the forgetting of ancestry, ritual, and kinship in exchange for power. The pain of whiteness is that it was never meant to nurture, only to dominate. And domination cannot nourish the soul.

This article traces the racial trauma of whiteness through history and into the present. It draws from decolonial sociology, critical race theory, and decolonial intelligence frameworks to show how whiteness replaced ethnic identities in Europe, how unprocessed grief festers in the descendants of colonizers, how narcissism and ego defenses arise when that grief is triggered, and how the emptiness of white culture explains why it remains extractive at its core. Whiteness is not a culture of celebration but of conquest. It invades, steals, and rebrands. It empties its carriers until they can only consume. And today, in the twenty-first century, that hollowness is cracking open as trauma.

The Birth of Whiteness: From Ethnicity to Colonial Category

Race is not ancient. Race is invented. As I write in my book, The Decolonial Awakening, ethnicity is what existed before borders and passports, before empires carved up the earth. Ethnicity was the songs sung to the sun, the dialects whispered across valleys, the herbs trusted for healing, the rituals carried through centuries. European peasants were Irish, Welsh, Basque, Sami, Sicilian, or Polish. They were embedded in place and ritual. Then came empire. And empire required hierarchy.

By the late 1600s, whiteness was not just an idea but a policy. Colonial laws in Virginia, for example, codified that Africans could be enslaved for life while poor Europeans could not. The purpose was not cultural pride but division. Empire needed to fracture solidarity between exploited groups. Poor Irish or Scottish indentured servants might have found common cause with enslaved Africans against landowners, but whiteness offered them a counterfeit elevation: you may be poor, but at least you are white. That counterfeit ticket became the foundation of a social order.

Whiteness demanded amnesia. People gave up dialects, clan names, and cosmologies to be accepted as “white.” Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants in America were not born white; they were inducted into it through processes of assimilation, erasure, and policing of difference. Whiteness did not preserve lineage. It destroyed it. What replaced it was a brand. Not memory but marketing. Not ancestry but hierarchy. A racial caste system engineered to justify the enslavement of Africans, the dispossession of Indigenous nations, and the plunder of the earth.

The Trauma of Replacement

Trauma is not only about violence inflicted. It is also about memory stolen. When whiteness was created, it demanded that Europeans forget who they were. People racialized as "white" inherited silence, shame, and disconnection. They were not born colonizers but were trained into empire’s service. The trauma lies in this replacement. They lost their songs and were given supremacy. They lost their clans and were given property. They lost their gods and were given empire.

This wound shows up today in the hollowness of white culture. Ask many white Americans to describe their culture, and they stumble. What is left is food consumed from others, music appropriated from others, rituals borrowed and stripped of meaning. Whiteness cannot celebrate itself because it has no roots to stand on. It can only extract. It can only perform. The trauma is disconnection disguised as supremacy.

Unprocessed grief is central to this story. White people grieve the loss of ancestral cultures they barely know they lost. The grief is unspoken, hidden under defensiveness. They do not sit in it, because the system has conditioned them to deny that loss and instead police conversations about race. But grief does not vanish when unacknowledged. It festers. It turns into shame. It hardens into fragility. And it lashes out as projection onto others.

Implicit Conditioning: Narcissism, Ego, and the Fragility Response

When racial conversations arise, many white people collapse into what Robin DiAngelo calls white fragility. Fragility is not oversensitivity. It is the surfacing of trauma responses. Narcissism, defensiveness, tears, and outrage appear because whiteness is an identity so fragile it shatters under truth. But fragility is only the visible tip of the iceberg. Underneath lies what I define in my article as Implicit Conditioning: A Decolonial Reframing of Cognitive Dissonance(June 25, 2025)

Western psychology has long explained these reactions with the language of cognitive dissonance, a theory coined in 1957 by Leon Festinger, a white American psychologist. Festinger argued that human beings feel discomfort when their beliefs and behaviors are inconsistent. For decades, this framework has been applied to explain why white people resist conversations about racism. They hold egalitarian values consciously (“I believe in equality”), yet act in ways that sustain supremacy. This contradiction, psychology tells us, produces internal conflict.

But cognitive dissonance is insufficient. It depoliticizes supremacy. It individualizes what is in fact systemic. It launders whiteness through the language of neutrality. Cognitive dissonance is not a neutral description of discomfort, it is a linguistic alibi for whiteness, a psychological laundering device that hides the fact that white defensiveness is not confusion but conditioning.

Definition: Implicit Conditioning

Implicit Conditioning is the unconscious neurobiological, psychological, and sociocultural programming by which individuals absorb, enact, and defend systems of dominance, particularly whiteness, patriarchy, ableism, and colonial logic, without conscious awareness. It is a survival and control mechanism, formed through repeated exposure to dominant narratives, social hierarchies, and institutional feedback loops.

Neurologically, Implicit Conditioning reflects the brain’s plasticity: its ability to adapt and rewire itself. Repeated inputs of dominance become hardwired into physiology. This is why racial conversations trigger not just discomfort but full-body defense.

The Neurobiology of Implicit Conditioning

• Amygdala activation: When white identity is confronted, the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, fires as if under threat. Racial truth is experienced not as information but as danger.

• Prefrontal cortex suppression: Under stress, the brain’s center for empathy and rational reasoning goes offline. This is why white people often cannot “hear” racial truth in the moment; their nervous system has been conditioned to shut down accountability.

• Reward circuitry: The brain’s dopamine system rewards behaviors that reinforce dominance. White people are socially and materially rewarded for defensiveness, avoidance, or silence. Fragility thus “feels good” in the nervous system because it preserves supremacy.

• Mirror neurons: These neurons allow humans to empathize with others. But under supremacy, they are conditioned to reflect only toward the in-group. White people are neurologically trained to empathize with other white people but remain blocked toward people of the global majority.

What appears as bias is actually conditioning. The body has been trained to collapse, deny, or attack when whiteness is challenged. Fragility is not weakness; it is empire speaking through the nervous system.

Beyond Psychology: The DEIBA Lens

To fully understand Implicit Conditioning, we must view it through a DEIBA framework:

• Decoloniality: Colonial conquest trained entire populations into obedience. Whiteness is the imperial software update that runs through education, religion, and media. Implicit Conditioning is not incidental; it is the operating system of empire.

• Equity: Western psychology universalizes white cognition. Implicit Conditioning reveals inequity at the neurological level: whose emotions are validated, whose cognition is “rational,” whose trauma is seen.

• Inclusion and Belonging: True belonging cannot exist while Implicit Conditioning scripts dominance into our reflexes. Inclusion means dismantling the operating system, not assimilating people into it.

• Accessibility: Traditional frameworks pathologize oppressed peoples while protecting dominant fragility. Implicit Conditioning reframes this by tracing discomfort to its systemic source.

Conditioning Across Systems of Oppression

Implicit Conditioning does not stop at race. It operates across patriarchy, ableism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, classism, and heteronormativity. Each hierarchy is coded into the nervous system:

• Boys rewarded for dominance and girls for deference (patriarchy).

• Disabled bodies coded as “burdens” (ableism).

• Muslim identity wired to trigger suspicion (Islamophobia).

• Poverty framed as personal failure (classism). These are not innate prejudices; they are conditioned instincts, encoded through repetition and institutional design.

Implications for White Fragility

Now we can reframe fragility. When white people cry, shout, or retreat in racial conversations, it is not confusion. It is not innocent dissonance. It is Implicit Conditioning. It is the conditioned reflex of supremacy defending itself. Fragility is the software update running perfectly. Narcissism becomes the mask, ego the armor, fragility the collapse. Beneath it all is grief. The grief of cultural loss. The grief of silence. The grief of complicity. But whiteness conditions its carriers never to metabolize grief, only to deflect it.

Liberation through De-conditioning

To dismantle this system, we must treat fragility not as oversensitivity but as programming. White people were not born fragile; they were conditioned to preserve dominance. The discomfort they feel in racial conversations is not evidence of conscience but evidence that the program is breaking down in real time. That discomfort is not a threat to humanity, it is an invitation to reclaim it.

For people of the global majority, Implicit Conditioning explains why survival has often meant assimilation, silence, and obedience. Liberation requires deprogramming both the oppressed and the privileged. For systems, it means rewriting the operating code of institutions, education, technology, law, that replicate conditioning as their default logic.

By naming fragility as Implicit Conditioning, we strip away the myth of neutrality. We stop excusing supremacy as confusion. We see it for what it is: empire wired into the nervous system. And in naming it, we begin to disarm it.

The Emptiness of White Culture

Whiteness is empty because it was built as a replacement, not as a culture. Cultures carry stories, rituals, cosmologies, foods, and kinship. Whiteness carries only hierarchy. It is not generative but consumptive. It is not celebratory but extractive. This explains why white culture is often described not in what it creates but in what it steals. Rock and roll, jazz, yoga, tacos, dreamcatchers, or African hairstyles, whiteness adopts, rebrands, and profits. Because it has no core of its own, it survives through appropriation.

This extractive metabolism mirrors colonialism itself. As decolonial theorists note, colonialism is not only the occupation of land but also the occupation of meaning. It steals not only gold but language. Not only labor but cosmology. Whiteness is this theft turned inward. It stole from Europeans their ethnic memory and turned them into agents of empire. This is why white identity feels like an emptiness: because it was designed as a container for extraction.

Whiteness as Systemic Addiction

The trauma of whiteness manifests like addiction. Addiction thrives on emptiness. It fills the void with consumption. Whiteness, too, fills its void through consuming others. It consumes land through colonization. It consumes labor through slavery and capitalism. It consumes culture through appropriation. It consumes even trauma, turning the pain of others into fuel for its own victim narratives. Like addiction, it numbs grief with consumption. And like addiction, it cannot be healed through denial.

Today, white people experience this as disconnection and despair. Rates of depression, addiction, and loneliness are rising in white communities. Suicide rates among middle-aged white Americans have increased, described as “deaths of despair.” While economic factors play a role, the cultural void of whiteness contributes as well. Without ritual, without belonging, without ancestral connection, many white people turn to opioids, alcohol, or nationalism to fill the hole. The system sells them cheap substitutes for culture: consumer goods, patriotism, racial pride. None satisfy. The trauma festers.

The Colonial Logic of Extraction

The emptiness of whiteness explains why it remains extractive at every level. Colonialism did not only shape whiteness; whiteness is colonialism. To be white is to carry the system that invades, steals, and renames. Whiteness steals food and calls it fusion. It steals land and calls it discovery. It steals labor and calls it progress. It steals knowledge and calls it science. Extraction is not an accident but the foundation of whiteness itself.

This is why whiteness cannot be “reformed.” Reforms that try to create “positive white identity” miss the point. Whiteness was never meant to be an identity of belonging. It was meant to erase belonging and replace it with domination. Reform cannot heal what was built as a wound. The only path is abolition: to disidentify from whiteness, to bury it, and to reclaim ancestry and humanity.

Racial Trauma in White People Today

Racial trauma in white people today is not the same as the trauma of the global majority, who live under the daily violence of racism, xenophobia, and colonial extraction. But it is real. White people carry trauma too: the trauma of disconnection, silence, shame, and complicity. They experience it as fragility, as defensive outrage, as loneliness, as addiction. This trauma often gets weaponized against others, but at its core it is grief.

Consider the resurgence of white nationalism. It is often framed as hatred, but underneath lies despair. White nationalists claim to defend “white culture” that never existed. What they are truly defending is a wound, a void dressed up as identity. They are desperate to protect a system that stole their lineage and gave them supremacy in return. Their violence is the acting out of unprocessed grief.

Consider also the epidemic of white fragility in workplaces and classrooms. When diversity trainings or anti-racism conversations occur, white participants often withdraw, cry, or attack. These are trauma responses. They reveal how deeply whiteness has conditioned its carriers to avoid grief. Instead of sitting with loss and complicity, they lash out. This is not an excuse for racist behavior, but it helps explain why transformation is so difficult. Trauma resists truth until it is processed.

Toward Repair: Beyond Whiteness

If whiteness is trauma, then healing requires moving beyond it. White people cannot build healthy culture inside whiteness, because whiteness is designed for extraction. They must instead reclaim ethnic roots, mourn losses, and practice solidarity beyond the racial hierarchy. Three forms of repair are essential.

First, grief work. White people must grieve what they lost. They must name the cultures, languages, and rituals erased by assimilation. They must sit with the pain of silence and remember that they were not born white. They were made white. Mourning this loss is not indulgence; it is necessary for healing.

Second, racial stamina. White people must develop the capacity to stay present in conversations about racism without collapsing. This means resisting narcissistic defenses, holding discomfort, and building resilience. Racial stamina is a practice of transforming trauma into accountability.

Third, solidarity. White people must join movements led by people of the global majority, not as saviors but as kin. This requires rejecting the lie of whiteness and choosing collective liberation. Ortiz reminds us: liberation is for all, but only if we are brave enough to tell the truth. Solidarity means dismantling the system that created whiteness, not clinging to it.

Conclusion: The End of Whiteness as Healing

The trauma of whiteness is the trauma of empire. It is the grief of lineage stolen, the shame of complicity, the fragility of ego, and the emptiness of culture built on extraction. White people today live this trauma as defensiveness, loneliness, and despair. But the wound does not have to define the future. Healing requires ending whiteness itself. It requires reclaiming ancestry, practicing grief, and joining collective struggle.

Whiteness was designed as a wound, not as an identity. The only path to healing is to end the wound. To end whiteness is not to erase people, but to free them from the lie that their worth is tied to supremacy. It is to return to lineage, ritual, and solidarity. It is to move from extraction to belonging. It is to say: you were not born white. You were born whole. And it is time to remember.

On the invention of whiteness and racial categories

• Allen, T. W. (1994). The invention of the white race (Vols. 1–2). Verso.

• Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Nation Books.

• Painter, N. I. (2010). The history of white people. W. W. Norton & Company.

On whiteness as systemic domination, fragility, and disconnection

• DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.

• Ortiz, C. (2025, June 25). Implicit conditioning: A decolonial reframing of cognitive dissonance. MOD Atlas Media.

• Ortiz, C. (2025). The decolonial awakening: A complete roadmap to collective liberation. MOD Atlas Media.

• Ortiz, C. (2025). The ultimate guide to the system of whiteness. MOD ATLAS MEDIA

On decolonial sociology and epistemic violence

• Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903/2007). The souls of Black folk. Oxford University Press.

• Weiner, M. F. (2018). Decolonial sociology: W. E. B. Du Bois’s foundational theoretical and methodological contributions. Sociology Compass, 12(6), e12601. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12601

• Mendoza, B. (2020). Decolonial theories in comparison. Journal of World Philosophies, 5(1), 43–60. https://doi.org/10.2979/jourworlphil.5.1.03

• Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.

On psychology, trauma, and implicit bias

• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

• Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. (2017). State of the science: Implicit bias review. The Ohio State University.

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

On appropriation, culture, and emptiness of whiteness

• hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press.

• Lipsitz, G. (1998). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity politics. Temple University Press.

• Roediger, D. R. (1999). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American working class. Verso.

On deaths of despair, addiction, and white disconnection

• Case, A., & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press.

• Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press. (for linking trauma, nationalism, and affect to systemic conditioning)

On liberation and collective repair

• Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing.

• Ortiz, C. (2025). DIAL: Decolonial intelligence for access & liberation. MOD ATLAS MEDIA

• Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Duke University Press.