Mr. James Baldwin taught me that white people don’t exist. He is explicit: “There are no white people.” This is from his essay entitled: “On being white… and other lies.” 

I started reading Mr. Baldwin’s oeuvre in 2018. I planned to do that clever millennial thing where you read all of an author’s works in one year. It is now 2025, and I am still reading James Baldwin. Thank god. I never plan to stop. 

One thing I’ve noticed across his works is that he did not often say or write “white people” – he used more accurate language:

• They

• The populace 

• Citizens

• Co-citizens 

• Countrymen

• Americans

• Ordinary Americans 

• Patriots 

• Pioneers

• The free and the brave

• The defenders of public space  

• The liberal community 

• Those who call themselves white

• Those who think of themselves as white

• Those who believe themselves to be white 

• Those who have betrayed themselves into being white 

• That identity which calls itself White 

• So thoroughly insulated a people 

• The great, vast, blank generality

How did white people get this way?, Mr. James Baldwin asks. And answers: “By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that black women, black men, and black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect.”

Which brings me to the second truth that Mr. James Baldwin taught me: you cannot harm someone, deny it, and be undamaged. 

For 400+ years, the people who believe ourselves to be white (have) perpetrate(d) harm against Black and brown people, our children watching, and call(ed) it not only permissible but required. Brutality committed or witnessed, unacknowledged and unrepaired, for generation upon generation, results in the suffering of those harmed and also the internal distortion of the perpetrators.

Mr. Baldwin explains: “There is a great captive Negro population here, which is well publicized but not well known. And what is not publicized, and what is not known at all, is that there is a great captive white population here too. No one has pointed out yet with any force that if I am not a man here, you are not a man here. You cannot lynch me and keep me in ghettos without becoming something monstrous yourselves.”

I began to get a visceral sense of this when I worked at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama. My job as part of the team that opened the Legacy Museum was to research the primary sources that documented white people enacting racial terrorism. EJI is brilliant in its framing of the content: instead of focusing on the victims, visitors are required to look into the eyes of the white perpetrators. And in those eyes, you witness the monstrosity that Mr. Baldwin describes. It is an emptiness. A source-less-ness. As Resmaa Menakem describes, there is a “ferality.” Where we know there should be sentience, there is instead disconnection. And those eyes are the same, from the enslavers to the lynchers to the segregators to the police – and the communities around them that did nothing to stop them. 

This includes my own family. I am the 12th generation of European settlers in what is now called the United States. We have chosen, again and again, to enact and/or to passively observe violence, from the creation of racialized chattel enslavement through each era of racial terrorism. That data leaves one in a bleak place. I recall a question that visitors to the EJI sites would often ask – how do you stay hopeful? My Black colleagues would share powerful testimony of their ancestors choosing love, dignity, and humanity despite the brutality, and how that continues to fortify them today. I never answered that question. Knowing my family line, what could I say?   

But, Mr. Baldwin did not leave us without instructions. I think of Notes of a Native Son, a book of essays that he published originally in 1955. In 1984, he wrote a new introduction in which he reflects on the absence of social change in those three decades. He writes, “The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.” At first, I got stuck on irrelevant – that hurt my ego. But as I kept re-reading, I finally heard him – this is our choice. Every day. To acknowledge or to deny. To repair or to destroy. To heal or to remain sick. And like learning to play an instrument or a sport, it is a muscle that gets stronger with practice. 

Our most powerful options for changemaking are the choices that we make every day within ourselves and with the “white” people and institutions we’re in relationship with. Do we respond to Uncle Arthur at the dinner table? Do we speak up at our team meeting? Do we do so with love and rigor, instead of with disdain and impatience? We don’t need to phonebank into a swing state or leave our communities to participate in the movement for justice. All of us already are at the front line of something. What could the world look like if we took on the responsibility, the mandate, the joy of contributing that which is uniquely ours, every day? As indigenous wisdom teaches us, when every being within an ecosystem understands and plays its role, that ecosystem thrives. No wonder ours is on fire. The missing part of the movement to achieve justice and liberation has always been the people who call ourselves white not even trying to understand what our role is, much less practice it.    

Now can be the time we break that pattern and initiate a new way of being. Mr. Baldwin reminded us: “I do not believe in the twentieth-century myth that we are all helpless, that it’s out of our hands. It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up.” 

Choosing to pick it up takes courage, but it really does feel good. I’m now organizing with Woodson family members to acknowledge and to repair the harm white Woodsons have enacted. Every other Sunday, white Woodsons meet alone together to work on our specific reparative actions that are in direct response to the violence that our forefathers enacted. Once a month, we meet with our Black Woodson cousins and advisors who provide guidance and redirection. We are practicing new ways of being, and developing healthy identity and culture for our family. So far, this is looking like: 

• developing new holidays to mark the year as a family, such as an annual day of mourning and commemoration in August when our white family members began enslaving African people in 1619, and a celebration of Dr. Carter G. Woodson on his birthday every December 19th 

• supporting our Black cousins with immediate financial needs

• making quarterly donations to the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, whose land my family colonized

• individually and collectively learning about the Pamunkey peoples' history and culture

• initiating contact with the Virginia Museum of History and Culture to rewrite their description of our family’s role in the violence against the Pamunkey Indian Tribe. The current curation is white-washed and untruthful, specifically as it relates to a gun my family used to murder Pamunkey people which remains on display there in an exhibit titled, “Taking Aim”

We range in age from 14 to 91, and live all across the country. Every day, it is hard. And every day, we are finding our way back to each other, back to the truth, back to our bodies, and back to humanity. 

In this 101st year since James Baldwin’s birth, I am so grateful to him. Thank you, Mr. Baldwin, for teaching those of us who think of ourselves as white that there is indeed another path. A path to becoming healed and whole and healthy. And that it is ours to choose.