I wish I had this article 10, 15 years ago. I've been working on de-conditioning myself for a long time, and no longer collapse, deny, or attack in these spaces; but so much of what you've laid out here is painful to read because of how clearly I see it now, and the associated discomfort and rage at being implicitly conditioned and helping sustain it without ever realizing.
Compounded by personal narcissistic trauma, military service, and growing up in a poor white area blinded me to the realities of things for most of my 20s, even after I left the military and went back to college I struggled to overcome the denial and grief towards what I was learning in my political science classes.
Because I had felt this wound without having a name for it, I refused to believe or see whiteness for what it was, instead I took it as a personal attack on me, an invalidation on my life struggles.
Eventually I managed to break through this, with a lot of internal work and help/perspective from some BIPOC friends. But this essay, Christian, spells everything out so clearly and in a way that I think would have helped me break my programming and reclaim meaning so much faster than the way I did.
Thank you. If I could, I'd make your essay required reading for every student in the U.S.
Hope you don't mind me sharing, it's uncomfortable to do so, but hopefully helps someone else.
I understand what you’re saying. And that is something I have noticed for all groups of people. As a female, I can go somewhere where there’s a bunch of kids and I feel safe in the knowledge that no one is going to look at me funny. I have heard people claim that males who want to be elementary school teachers are pedophiles. There are things a man can go and feel safe that many women cannot understand. Every group has that, and I completely acknowledge that some groups are dealing with more of that than others.
But my views on the complexity of individual individuals comes from how my brain works. It doesn’t come from conditioning. I I get into conversations about this all the time with people. I am a female who has been in jobs that are very male dominated including a couple where I was the only woman and I still saw myself as an individual and the men that I worked with as individuals. That’s just how I see the world. Everyone else may not have that experience, but I have always had that. When people talk about how women do this or that, I don’t feel like I’m part of that group. And I feel that for any other group of people with the exception maybe being my religion as often times if you are part of a religion, you do adopt the belief system that go with it and the cultural similarities that go along with that. Especially one that people have because of where their ancestors came from. That tends to be a big part of your life, but even then I have many disagreements with those who share my faith.
This reminds me of the saying that people make all the time that men and women are different. And I always think that’s such a funny thing to say because men and men are different and women and women are different. That saying makes it out like all men are the same, and all women are the same.
I guess overall what I’m saying is sometimes we see the world based upon how our brains work and our experiences which other people just don’t know. Not everyone can be put in a box of being conditioned this way or thinking this way etc. I just think that causes a lot of problems when we look at people as groups instead of meeting them where they are individually, which is an unknown until we get to know them. And I know right now that’s not a very popular view. But I’m not really concerned about going along with what is popular. I have never had issues with people in my life because I do try to treat everybody individually with respect, and I think it’s a good philosophy of life. And that’s not to say that people can’t look at structural changes, but I think that has to be had at a different level than adhering to the same stereotypes that probably started the problems in the first place.
I know flippancy is popular online but I am not being flip when I say this, but rather serious. You might want to consider that you have adopted a new programming. This is a popular ideology that is no different to a religious extremist. The new adherent to a religion often adopts all the beliefs they are given and see that as the answer to all their problems.
It is that practice, rather than the religion that I object to.
"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."
This quote from the article above is an example of the absolutism of the belief. See, there is a built-in answer for those who object. They are fragile, they can't handle the questioning of their existence, etc. How is this different to do as I say or you have sinned? Agree with me or be one of the bad people?
There are a lot of false teachers around today since we are so connected online, but so many are simply selling a new religion.
Note: I am not anti-religious, but I am aware that many use it to gain power over others and to control how they think.
Whiteness itself is the programming. It conditions fragility, denial, and retreat in the face of truth. Naming that conditioning is not ideology, it’s clarity.
What you call ‘new programming’ is actually deprogramming. The difference between belief and conditioning is this: belief can be chosen, but conditioning is imposed. Liberation begins by breaking the script, not defending it.
But it’s too neat and boxed up with a ribbon. That experience is probably not what most people would even recognize. I applaud questioning as I am a heretic through and through but I think this issue is more complex than the framing. Admittedly, I tend to see people individually as quite complex so I always reject this type of framing as it makes no sense to my brain. But I understand not everyone looks at the world the same way. Appreciate the conversation.
What you’re experiencing is the tension, the tug of war between implicit conditioning and ego withering away. To truly grasp these truths we’re discussing requires clarity. It’s all I’m offering. I appreciate you for having this conversation. These moments right here matter.
No, I don’t have the feelings you attribute. I have a lot of culture reference from my ancestors and a sense of self that has nothing to do with my sex, race, age, nationality, or any other grouping. So I am not struggling with any tension. I just don’t agree with the analysis from my experience in seeing others with that same level of complexity. But what I was acknowledging is that others may feel that way as I cannot even begin to know what others are going through or thinking as that is so individual. People really are very different.
I hear you, and I appreciate your willingness to stay in the conversation. That matters. But I need to lovingly push into something deeper here.
What you’ve described, that your sense of self has nothing to do with sex, race, age, nationality, or any other grouping, isn’t evidence of neutrality. It’s a product of the dominant system’s conditioning, specifically the conditioning of whiteness to disidentify from social location while still benefiting from it. That feeling of being “just human” or “beyond categories” is not universal. It is a colonial affordance, granted most often to those whose identities have been constructed as “default.” It’s not a flaw in your character. It’s the training. It's what I've identified as Implicit Conditioning, the structural, neurocultural architecture designed to protect dominance by dislocating identity from systems of power.
You said you don’t feel tension, but that is the tension itself. The absence of perceived conflict between your identity and the world is privileged alignment within a system that doesn’t ask you to feel it. You’re not wrong to feel complex. You are. But complexity doesn’t cancel systemic patterning. In fact, the system thrives when we believe we’re too unique to be impacted by it. And when you say, “People really are very different.”
Yes, we are. But different doesn’t mean disconnected from structure. Our experiences are individual. But the systems we’re navigating are shared, inherited, and real. Complexity doesn't negate conditioning. It masks it when we’re not taught to name it.
Here’s the invitation. Rather than asking, “Does this reflect how I feel?” Try asking, “How was I trained not to feel it?”
Rather than relying on disagreement based on experience, consider whose experiences have historically been erased to protect the illusion of neutrality? This is where liberation begins.
Not by defending individuality, but by unlearning how the system taught us to use it as a shield. That unlearning isn’t a threat to your wholeness. It’s a return to it. You weren’t born outside of systems. You were trained to believe you were.
Yes!!! I always say that the final stage of colonization is becoming the colonizer. The colonized person’s body is enslaved. The colonizer’s soul is enslaved.
This is also why figures pushing assimilation are so deeply dangerous. They are robbing their own communities of the spiritual sovereignty that has been maintained even through centuries of oppression.
You can see it in recent decades in Éireann/Ireland. The Irish people, who maintained spiritual sovereignty under centuries of occupation, have become more and more spiritually colonized as they've become a part of global capitalism, European imperialism, etc. By mimicking and becoming a part of colonial systems of the State, Capitalism, etc the Irish are losing the spiritual and cultural sovereignty we fought to maintain. Most without even realizing it.
Right here with you. Canadian Scottish/ Irish/ German here on stolen land in the middle of Saskatchewan, Canada where people have been mentally ill for generations.
This is one of the most important things I’ve read here. I have only heard this spoken of once before. We need this at the heart of discourse. Thank you thank you thank you for opening the door (I am only 2min in to listening and I already know what I just said is true).
As long as these color labels exist, we remain prisoners of the past. Whiteness is not an ethnicity, and nor is blackness, or redness, or yelliowness. The problem, as you so rightly pointed out, is not racism but guilt, and projected guilt, and the politics of guilt.
Yes! This is Baldwin’s “Price of the Ticket”. See also Resmaa Menakem’s excellent book My Grandmothers Hands, and Alison Bailey, The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege Race and Ignorance.
I first came across this viewpoint tangentially when I heard Resmaa Menakem talking with Krista Tippett on On Being, but I love how you've built on it more here.
I am white and English, and I find myself thinking about how this manifests itself in the UK. I definitely relate to a lot of the emotional reactions you've laid out here, despite in theory being close to my roots, because I still live in England, where my family has been for a century, if not more. Learning about the process of land enclosure, starting from roughly the 1400s until the Parliamentary Enclosures of the 1800s, has been a really key part of unpicking this sense of disconnection, and I think points towards a formative trauma that has compounded over time for the English. This possibly includes the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, but my personal knowledge on this isn't yet that solid or fleshed out, so can't say for sure.
I'd really recommend reading 'The Book of Trepass' by Nick Hayes, who devotes the whole book to this subject, and 'A Natural History of the Hedgerow' by John Wright, which has some really useful chapters that I think provide interesting reading. Anyway, I don't have much more to add for now, but thank you once more for sharing this. I will be sharing this article with as many people as possible!
Hi Rebecca I am also English and relate deeply to what Christian writes. Coming from a very working class background it feels like deference, in service of survival, is deeply buried in the English psyche in mostly unrecognised and profoundly damaging ways. And there is an emptiness there, which I see also in my own family and history. I don't know anyone else who is thinking about these issues, so wondered if you would be interested in chatting about how this relates to the UK?
Hi Tracey, thank you for your comment! I would be thrilled to talk more about these issues with you, as I am very keen to dive into this more. I also think this subject intertwines nicely with how we can imagine, or reimagine, what English identity is, and what it can be - how it can be more expansive and decolonial. Lots to get stuck into! Feel free to message me directly - in the meantime I will give you a follow so I can keep I contact :)
Also UK person here, I live in ne in an old coal mining area and the grief for mine closure is still collectively held, although not often named as grief, but its so rare to hear folks talk about how families ended up in these areas forming new communities. Like peoples personal histories only began when this new community began. Finding ways to bring in this deeper history and exploring together how its still present feels important but becomes more in the dreaming/imagining level
This is so thrillingly crisp! The beautiful clarity here tells me you’ve lived with these thoughts for a long time. I am grateful to benefit from that processing by reading. I hope this hits others like a thunderbolt as it does me!
Ah, yes, well argued and well referenced and I think it certainly applies. My concern is that the erasing of culture is also part of urbanisation and that this process is underway across the world, across many cultures, a homogenisation of humanity as it were. How deliberate it all is I think is arguable, maybe it is just the need to dominate that drives the process, it looks like strategy in hindsight maybe.
This is an excellent point Steve, one I've thought of as well but not explored in too much depth. I can't remember the exact terminology, but there is a concept where multiple strategies or intentions of smaller interests (companies, kings, governments, etc.) line up over time and something that was not deliberate in a global sense eventually comes to be seen as such because of the connecting thread of control and dominance.
"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." This just gets to the heart of the matter. There's so many more quotes too. So clearly laid out, putting words to my experiences. I'll keep coming back to this to process. Thank you.
Thank you. Your writing was eye-opening and profound. I grew up in an all-white neighborhood in the 80's as the first Black family and didn't understand why no one would play with me. Reading your article explains so much about growing up this way and why those kids and their families just could not understand me or themselves.
This is one of the most compassionate and thoroughly researched articles on this topic that I have read over the past few years. Incredible gratitude for your labor and the love that shines through every word.
I wish I had this article 10, 15 years ago. I've been working on de-conditioning myself for a long time, and no longer collapse, deny, or attack in these spaces; but so much of what you've laid out here is painful to read because of how clearly I see it now, and the associated discomfort and rage at being implicitly conditioned and helping sustain it without ever realizing.
Compounded by personal narcissistic trauma, military service, and growing up in a poor white area blinded me to the realities of things for most of my 20s, even after I left the military and went back to college I struggled to overcome the denial and grief towards what I was learning in my political science classes.
Because I had felt this wound without having a name for it, I refused to believe or see whiteness for what it was, instead I took it as a personal attack on me, an invalidation on my life struggles.
Eventually I managed to break through this, with a lot of internal work and help/perspective from some BIPOC friends. But this essay, Christian, spells everything out so clearly and in a way that I think would have helped me break my programming and reclaim meaning so much faster than the way I did.
Thank you. If I could, I'd make your essay required reading for every student in the U.S.
Hope you don't mind me sharing, it's uncomfortable to do so, but hopefully helps someone else.
What gift this is. Please do share it. I pray it reaches those it needs to.
I understand what you’re saying. And that is something I have noticed for all groups of people. As a female, I can go somewhere where there’s a bunch of kids and I feel safe in the knowledge that no one is going to look at me funny. I have heard people claim that males who want to be elementary school teachers are pedophiles. There are things a man can go and feel safe that many women cannot understand. Every group has that, and I completely acknowledge that some groups are dealing with more of that than others.
But my views on the complexity of individual individuals comes from how my brain works. It doesn’t come from conditioning. I I get into conversations about this all the time with people. I am a female who has been in jobs that are very male dominated including a couple where I was the only woman and I still saw myself as an individual and the men that I worked with as individuals. That’s just how I see the world. Everyone else may not have that experience, but I have always had that. When people talk about how women do this or that, I don’t feel like I’m part of that group. And I feel that for any other group of people with the exception maybe being my religion as often times if you are part of a religion, you do adopt the belief system that go with it and the cultural similarities that go along with that. Especially one that people have because of where their ancestors came from. That tends to be a big part of your life, but even then I have many disagreements with those who share my faith.
This reminds me of the saying that people make all the time that men and women are different. And I always think that’s such a funny thing to say because men and men are different and women and women are different. That saying makes it out like all men are the same, and all women are the same.
I guess overall what I’m saying is sometimes we see the world based upon how our brains work and our experiences which other people just don’t know. Not everyone can be put in a box of being conditioned this way or thinking this way etc. I just think that causes a lot of problems when we look at people as groups instead of meeting them where they are individually, which is an unknown until we get to know them. And I know right now that’s not a very popular view. But I’m not really concerned about going along with what is popular. I have never had issues with people in my life because I do try to treat everybody individually with respect, and I think it’s a good philosophy of life. And that’s not to say that people can’t look at structural changes, but I think that has to be had at a different level than adhering to the same stereotypes that probably started the problems in the first place.
"helped me break my programming"
I know flippancy is popular online but I am not being flip when I say this, but rather serious. You might want to consider that you have adopted a new programming. This is a popular ideology that is no different to a religious extremist. The new adherent to a religion often adopts all the beliefs they are given and see that as the answer to all their problems.
It is that practice, rather than the religion that I object to.
"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."
This quote from the article above is an example of the absolutism of the belief. See, there is a built-in answer for those who object. They are fragile, they can't handle the questioning of their existence, etc. How is this different to do as I say or you have sinned? Agree with me or be one of the bad people?
There are a lot of false teachers around today since we are so connected online, but so many are simply selling a new religion.
Note: I am not anti-religious, but I am aware that many use it to gain power over others and to control how they think.
Whiteness itself is the programming. It conditions fragility, denial, and retreat in the face of truth. Naming that conditioning is not ideology, it’s clarity.
What you call ‘new programming’ is actually deprogramming. The difference between belief and conditioning is this: belief can be chosen, but conditioning is imposed. Liberation begins by breaking the script, not defending it.
But it’s too neat and boxed up with a ribbon. That experience is probably not what most people would even recognize. I applaud questioning as I am a heretic through and through but I think this issue is more complex than the framing. Admittedly, I tend to see people individually as quite complex so I always reject this type of framing as it makes no sense to my brain. But I understand not everyone looks at the world the same way. Appreciate the conversation.
What you’re experiencing is the tension, the tug of war between implicit conditioning and ego withering away. To truly grasp these truths we’re discussing requires clarity. It’s all I’m offering. I appreciate you for having this conversation. These moments right here matter.
No, I don’t have the feelings you attribute. I have a lot of culture reference from my ancestors and a sense of self that has nothing to do with my sex, race, age, nationality, or any other grouping. So I am not struggling with any tension. I just don’t agree with the analysis from my experience in seeing others with that same level of complexity. But what I was acknowledging is that others may feel that way as I cannot even begin to know what others are going through or thinking as that is so individual. People really are very different.
I hear you, and I appreciate your willingness to stay in the conversation. That matters. But I need to lovingly push into something deeper here.
What you’ve described, that your sense of self has nothing to do with sex, race, age, nationality, or any other grouping, isn’t evidence of neutrality. It’s a product of the dominant system’s conditioning, specifically the conditioning of whiteness to disidentify from social location while still benefiting from it. That feeling of being “just human” or “beyond categories” is not universal. It is a colonial affordance, granted most often to those whose identities have been constructed as “default.” It’s not a flaw in your character. It’s the training. It's what I've identified as Implicit Conditioning, the structural, neurocultural architecture designed to protect dominance by dislocating identity from systems of power.
You said you don’t feel tension, but that is the tension itself. The absence of perceived conflict between your identity and the world is privileged alignment within a system that doesn’t ask you to feel it. You’re not wrong to feel complex. You are. But complexity doesn’t cancel systemic patterning. In fact, the system thrives when we believe we’re too unique to be impacted by it. And when you say, “People really are very different.”
Yes, we are. But different doesn’t mean disconnected from structure. Our experiences are individual. But the systems we’re navigating are shared, inherited, and real. Complexity doesn't negate conditioning. It masks it when we’re not taught to name it.
Here’s the invitation. Rather than asking, “Does this reflect how I feel?” Try asking, “How was I trained not to feel it?”
Rather than relying on disagreement based on experience, consider whose experiences have historically been erased to protect the illusion of neutrality? This is where liberation begins.
Not by defending individuality, but by unlearning how the system taught us to use it as a shield. That unlearning isn’t a threat to your wholeness. It’s a return to it. You weren’t born outside of systems. You were trained to believe you were.
Yes!!! I always say that the final stage of colonization is becoming the colonizer. The colonized person’s body is enslaved. The colonizer’s soul is enslaved.
This is also why figures pushing assimilation are so deeply dangerous. They are robbing their own communities of the spiritual sovereignty that has been maintained even through centuries of oppression.
You can see it in recent decades in Éireann/Ireland. The Irish people, who maintained spiritual sovereignty under centuries of occupation, have become more and more spiritually colonized as they've become a part of global capitalism, European imperialism, etc. By mimicking and becoming a part of colonial systems of the State, Capitalism, etc the Irish are losing the spiritual and cultural sovereignty we fought to maintain. Most without even realizing it.
Fascinating. Pinpointing all my thoughts/feelings/grief as a Scottish Highlander living on Indigenous stolen land in Australia.
Right here with you. Canadian Scottish/ Irish/ German here on stolen land in the middle of Saskatchewan, Canada where people have been mentally ill for generations.
This is one of the most important things I’ve read here. I have only heard this spoken of once before. We need this at the heart of discourse. Thank you thank you thank you for opening the door (I am only 2min in to listening and I already know what I just said is true).
Christian, this is superb! I have never read a piece on this topic with such eloquence. Thank you for creating it. I hope it serves everyone well.
As long as these color labels exist, we remain prisoners of the past. Whiteness is not an ethnicity, and nor is blackness, or redness, or yelliowness. The problem, as you so rightly pointed out, is not racism but guilt, and projected guilt, and the politics of guilt.
Yes! This is Baldwin’s “Price of the Ticket”. See also Resmaa Menakem’s excellent book My Grandmothers Hands, and Alison Bailey, The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege Race and Ignorance.
I first came across this viewpoint tangentially when I heard Resmaa Menakem talking with Krista Tippett on On Being, but I love how you've built on it more here.
I am white and English, and I find myself thinking about how this manifests itself in the UK. I definitely relate to a lot of the emotional reactions you've laid out here, despite in theory being close to my roots, because I still live in England, where my family has been for a century, if not more. Learning about the process of land enclosure, starting from roughly the 1400s until the Parliamentary Enclosures of the 1800s, has been a really key part of unpicking this sense of disconnection, and I think points towards a formative trauma that has compounded over time for the English. This possibly includes the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, but my personal knowledge on this isn't yet that solid or fleshed out, so can't say for sure.
I'd really recommend reading 'The Book of Trepass' by Nick Hayes, who devotes the whole book to this subject, and 'A Natural History of the Hedgerow' by John Wright, which has some really useful chapters that I think provide interesting reading. Anyway, I don't have much more to add for now, but thank you once more for sharing this. I will be sharing this article with as many people as possible!
Hi Rebecca I am also English and relate deeply to what Christian writes. Coming from a very working class background it feels like deference, in service of survival, is deeply buried in the English psyche in mostly unrecognised and profoundly damaging ways. And there is an emptiness there, which I see also in my own family and history. I don't know anyone else who is thinking about these issues, so wondered if you would be interested in chatting about how this relates to the UK?
Hi Tracey, thank you for your comment! I would be thrilled to talk more about these issues with you, as I am very keen to dive into this more. I also think this subject intertwines nicely with how we can imagine, or reimagine, what English identity is, and what it can be - how it can be more expansive and decolonial. Lots to get stuck into! Feel free to message me directly - in the meantime I will give you a follow so I can keep I contact :)
Also UK person here, I live in ne in an old coal mining area and the grief for mine closure is still collectively held, although not often named as grief, but its so rare to hear folks talk about how families ended up in these areas forming new communities. Like peoples personal histories only began when this new community began. Finding ways to bring in this deeper history and exploring together how its still present feels important but becomes more in the dreaming/imagining level
Because of this cut, and fragmented history, huge creativity is needed to weave us back in to the songs of this island.
This is so thrillingly crisp! The beautiful clarity here tells me you’ve lived with these thoughts for a long time. I am grateful to benefit from that processing by reading. I hope this hits others like a thunderbolt as it does me!
I feel the absence of any connection to history and culture like a hole in my heart. I always have.
Facing the grief of complicity is painful, but oh, so liberating!
Thank you for speaking to the sweetness of our inner, wounded hearts.
Ah, yes, well argued and well referenced and I think it certainly applies. My concern is that the erasing of culture is also part of urbanisation and that this process is underway across the world, across many cultures, a homogenisation of humanity as it were. How deliberate it all is I think is arguable, maybe it is just the need to dominate that drives the process, it looks like strategy in hindsight maybe.
This is an excellent point Steve, one I've thought of as well but not explored in too much depth. I can't remember the exact terminology, but there is a concept where multiple strategies or intentions of smaller interests (companies, kings, governments, etc.) line up over time and something that was not deliberate in a global sense eventually comes to be seen as such because of the connecting thread of control and dominance.
"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." This just gets to the heart of the matter. There's so many more quotes too. So clearly laid out, putting words to my experiences. I'll keep coming back to this to process. Thank you.
Thank you. Your writing was eye-opening and profound. I grew up in an all-white neighborhood in the 80's as the first Black family and didn't understand why no one would play with me. Reading your article explains so much about growing up this way and why those kids and their families just could not understand me or themselves.
This is one of the most compassionate and thoroughly researched articles on this topic that I have read over the past few years. Incredible gratitude for your labor and the love that shines through every word.
💙💙💙