To My Beige Kindred; love speaks from the heart. I love you, ALWAYS.

Nobody is white.

This seems like an odd place to start, but look at your arm under decent light. Unless you’ve recently died, you will not find white. You’ll find beige, maybe with olive undertones. Pink if you’ve been exercising. Cream, sand, wheat – the cosmetics industry abandoned ‘white’ as a descriptor generations ago because it’s useless for matching actual skin. And yet the word persists in every other domain, load-bearing for an entire architecture of social meaning. The observation seems almost childishly obvious once stated. A group of beige-skinned people declared themselves ‘white’ – with all the cultural freight that color carries: purity, divinity, light, blamelessness. Perhaps self-identification deserves accommodation, no different from pronouns. But they didn’t stop at self-description. They built legal systems that made the mythology material, imposing the legal subclass ‘colored’ on everyone else. The claim wasn’t figurative – it was literalized into civic reality. This is what makes looking at your arm not figurative: they asserted the color applied literally; it literally doesn’t. The self-designation was not an error of perception. It was propaganda that got naturalized into fact. Why should anyone keep using it? This isn’t a proposal for social change. It’s not an experiment in whether different vocabulary might produce better outcomes. It’s simpler than that. The claim is false. The people calling themselves “white” aren’t white – look at them, my kinsfolks. Beige, pink, cream, occasionally ruddy. The word they use is a lie they’ve been telling so long they’ve forgotten it’s a lie. Nobody is obligated to honor a lie just because it’s been institutionalized for three centuries. A natural question follows: if “white” is a lie because nobody’s skin is actually white, isn’t “Black” equally false? Nobody’s skin is literally black either – it’s brown, copper, umber, deep mahogany. If the criterion is perceptual accuracy, both terms fail equally. Agreed. But perceptual accuracy isn’t the decisive criterion. That criterion is christening.

One group claimed for themselves the color of angels. In that same act, everyone else became deviations – gradations of distance from the self-declared pure. The idea of ‘colored’ only exists as a shadow, a contrast to the invention of ‘white’. No one christened “colored” upon themselves. The category was an external imposition, the photographic negative of civic self-flattery. What happened later was different. The terms that had been foisted – Negro, Colored – were rejected. The Black Power movement retooled the same word used to demonize them – ‘Black,’ the designated contrast to the ideal – as radical acceptance. This wasn’t some elevated self-christening outside the already-framed context. It was a defiant resignation to transform an externally framed social hierarchy, an effort at self-determination. “Black is beautiful” was an assertion to rise above denigration – courageous, necessary, and still subservient to the framework it sought to escape. Renovations do not alter foundations; ceilings stay fixed. The critical focus of this essay falls on ‘white’ because that’s where the mythology was fashioned and still remains its cardinal scaffold. This is the fabrication that created other shades – including the counter-designation that accepted its role as contrast. What alternatives exist for those who refuse the mythology entirely? Actual colors work fine: beige, brown, olive, cream. Disparities between beige and brown Americans can be tracked without validating anyone’s cosmic self-description, a description that at the same time demeans the rest of the group. The analytical work survives. The self-indulgent lie is simply unnecessary.

Before there was “whiteness”, there was only skin. The Old English word for bright or shining described surfaces without marking souls. Medieval Europeans encountering Africans noticed difference the way one notices any unfamiliar thing – with curiosity, sometimes hostility, but without a systematic theory ranking humanity by complexion. That theory came later, and it came deliberately. The word ‘white’ as a racial identifier first appears in the written record around 1600, but its real birth comes in the courthouses and legislative chambers of colonial Virginia. The slave codes of the early 1700s represent something genuinely new: the legal creation of a race. These laws established that Christian “white” servants could not be whipped without judicial order, while enslaved Africans were declared property – real estate, transferable like land. The word ‘white’ here does work it had never done before. It isn’t describing appearance. It’s creating a legal category with rights attached. The timing wasn’t accidental. A few decades earlier, indentured servants and enslaved people had risen together against the colonial elite – a coalition of the exploited recognizing common interest across the color line. The uprising terrified the planter class. Here was their nightmare: poor Europeans and enslaved Africans acting on shared grievance. The racial codes that followed were, in essence, a bribe. European servants would receive psychological and legal privileges – the right to own guns, testify in court, move freely – in exchange for identifying with their masters rather than their fellow laborers. Poor Europeans accepted what amounted to a psychological wage of superiority in lieu of economic justice. The bargain proved durable. It structures American society to this day. This is how the lie began. Not as description but as propaganda – a legal fiction dressed up as natural fact. The beige people of Virginia weren’t “white” before the codes. They became “white” because the category was useful for dividing potential solidarity. The word was invented to do political work, and it’s been doing that work ever since.

Courts later tasked with defining ‘white’ for immigration purposes kept running into an embarrassing problem: they couldn’t agree on what the word meant. In the early 1920s, the Supreme Court decided two cases within months of each other. In the first, a Japanese immigrant sought citizenship, arguing his skin was lighter than many recognized “white” Americans. The Court rejected him – he wasn’t “Caucasian,” they said, appealing to scientific racial classifications. The second case involved a high-caste Sikh who was, by those same scientific standards, indisputably Caucasian. The Court denied him too, this time reversing course entirely. Science didn’t matter, they now held. What mattered was “the understanding of the common man.” The contradiction was total. One case used science to exclude; the other rejected science to exclude. The only consistent principle was exclusion itself. In the years following, dozens of people who had already been granted citizenship found it revoked. They had been made “white” by law, then unmade. These weren’t edge cases revealing ambiguity at the margins. They were exposures of the void at the center. Judges determining “whiteness” examined skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and – most revealingly – popular opinion. The list itself confesses the absence of any principled criterion. “Whiteness” was whatever needed to be said to maintain the hierarchy. The courts couldn’t define ‘white’ because there was nothing to define. The word doesn’t point at anything real. It points at a status – a manufactured position in a manufactured hierarchy. The judges kept reaching for criteria because they couldn’t admit the obvious: they were enforcing a fiction.

Svetlana Mirović learned she was “white” on a Tuesday in October, though she didn’t recognize the moment for what it was until years later. She was nine years old, sitting in the back of her grandmother’s Buick outside a grocery store in Gary, Indiana. Her grandmother had gone inside to argue about something – a coupon, a deli order, the eternal grievances of the elderly – and Svetlana was watching two boys on bikes circle the parking lot. They were Brown, maybe twelve or thirteen, doing tricks off the curb. One of them caught her looking and waved. She waved back. When her grandmother returned, she’d seen the exchange. The lecture that followed was delivered in Serbian, which her grandmother reserved for serious matters: boys, money, and people who couldn’t be trusted. The gist was that Svetlana should not wave at strangers, should not draw attention, should not give anyone reason to think she was like them. “We’re not like them,” her grandmother said. “We worked. We became Americans.” The statement confused Svetlana at the time. The boys had been doing bike tricks, not robbing anyone. And her grandmother, with her thick accent and her strange foods and her icons of saints Svetlana couldn’t name, seemed pretty different from the other Americans Svetlana knew. But she filed it away, the way children file away things they don’t understand but sense are important.

Twenty-five years later, Svetlana teaches immigration history at a state university. She has published papers on ethnic succession in industrial cities, on the mechanisms by which Slavic and Italian and Jewish workers became “white” through participation in anti-Black discrimination. She knows, as an academic matter, exactly what her grandmother was doing in that parking lot. Claiming membership. Drawing the line of racial seniority. Accepting the bargain. What she can’t quite access, even now, is whether her grandmother believed it. Whether the claim to “whiteness” felt like truth or strategy or desperate self-preservation – the assertion of a status that might be revoked if not continuously performed. Her grandmother is dead now. The question can’t be asked. Svetlana checks “white” on forms. She does it automatically, without thinking, the way her grandmother once intended. But sometimes, filling in the bubble, she thinks about the boys on bikes, about the wave, about how easily a different choice could have been made. Her grandmother had options that day. She chose to teach her granddaughter where the line was and which side they were on. The lesson took. What Svetlana can’t decide is whether she’s obligated to keep honoring it. This is how the lie propagates. Not just through law but through teaching – through grandmothers in parking lots drawing lines their granddaughters will inherit. Svetlana’s grandmother wasn’t “white” before she arrived in America. She became “white” by learning to claim the category, by teaching her children to claim it, by enforcing the boundary that made the claim meaningful. The fiction requires continuous performance. It doesn’t survive without willing performers.

“Whiteness” derives its power not from being seen but from being assumed. This is the mechanism that makes the lie so difficult to dislodge. Languages organize concepts through marking – distinguishing defaults from deviations. The unmarked term is treated as normal, generic, human. The marked term is defined against it. A “white” novelist is a “novelist”; a Black novelist is a “Black novelist.” A “white” neighborhood is a “neighborhood”; a Black neighborhood is a “Black neighborhood.” The asymmetry runs so deep it usually passes without notice – which is precisely the point. Invisibility is the mechanism. The phrase “people of color” reveals the structure in the act of trying to subvert it. The term assumes a “people of no color” – “whiteness” positioned as transparent baseline against which others are measured. One group is raced. The other is just people. Color symbolism predates this arrangement but reinforces it. Light carries associations with purity, innocence, goodness across Western culture. Darkness signals danger and pollution. These meanings are old – older than racialization – but they map onto the racial binary with disturbing precision. People make immorality-darkness associations quickly, automatically, without conscious thought. When Europeans encountered African peoples, existing symbolic structures were ready-made for exploitation. Moral connotations attached to human beings, providing a vocabulary of contempt that felt, to those using it, like merely describing reality. To call a group of people ‘white’ is to grant their self-christening – to accept their claim to superceding virtue. Angels are white. Brides wear white. The divine is associated with light.

Then for centuries, the law made it material – ‘white’ meant who could own, vote, testify, move freely. The term didn’t just mark identity the way pronouns do today. It determined who counted as fully human. This is what makes ‘Black’ equally problematic – not in origin, but in effect. To accept the contrast position is to haggle for dignity within an architecture built to deny it, using vocabulary that reinforces your counterpart’s cosmic symbolism while appearing to affirm their darker characterizations of you. You don’t have to play the game at all. Those who adopted ‘white’ for themselves were claiming a higher status, a racial seniority that skin color alone could never confer, the default expectation for de facto deference. The self-designation was aspirational, a category one could declare membership in regardless of what the mirror showed. Look at them, still my treasured fellows – beige, pink, cream, occasionally ruddy. The word they use for themselves is a lie they’ve been telling so long they’ve forgotten it’s a lie. And somehow, we all keep playing along. This is why refusing the term matters – not because refusal will fix anything, but because the term itself is propaganda. Using it, even critically, preserves its mythology. Calling someone ‘white’ affirms a self-christening with connotations they haven’t earned, don’t deserve, and demeans you in the same breath. Why should you do that?

Here is the peculiar feature of contemporary racial discourse: even the critics of “whiteness” use the word ‘whiteness.’ Progressive racial analysis insists you must name “whiteness” to critique it. You need the category to track disparities, identify structural advantages, make visible what was designed to be invisible. The arguments are practical and compelling. Data collection by race has documented inequalities that would otherwise go unmeasured. Educational gaps. Health outcomes. Wealth accumulation that differs by orders of magnitude. Without racial categorization, this evidence wouldn’t exist. The categories make the problem visible – and visibility is the precondition for remedy. The theoretical arguments run parallel. “Whiteness” has cash value. It translates into better housing, safer neighborhoods, stronger professional networks, inherited wealth. Ignoring race means ignoring the mechanism by which these advantages are distributed. Color-blindness, in this view, functions as blindness to injustice – a refusal to see what is plainly there. Some societies have tried that blindness. Much of continental Europe, shaped by the catastrophe of race science in the twentieth century, maintains relative silence about race – preferring terms like “cultural background” or “migration background.” The discretion is understandable. The results are instructive. When you can’t name a phenomenon, you can’t measure it. When you can’t measure it, you can’t track whether it’s getting better or worse. The refusal to speak of race becomes, in its own way, a form of permission for racism to operate unobserved. Silence isn’t neutrality. It’s cover.

So there’s a real dilemma about whether to track race at all. But notice what’s not part of the dilemma: whether to keep using the oppressor’s preferred self-description. The woman who calls herself “white” and a fairer-skinned colleague brown isn’t making a perceptual error. She’s insisting on the loaded terminology, maintaining the linguistic hierarchy while performing its critique. She wants to be “white” even while condemning “whiteness.” Why should anyone honor that? The claim is false. She’s beige – maybe caramel, depending on the season. The word she uses for herself is propaganda she inherited and never thought to question. Consider what changes if we don’t honor it. Demographic research could track income disparities between beige and brown Americans. Studies could examine housing discrimination against olive-skinned applicants. Wealth gaps could be measured across actual complexion categories. The statistics would be identical. The analytical power would remain. What would disappear is the embedded flattery – the sense that one group earned its cosmic adjective while everyone else is defined by deviation from it.

Kendrick Oyelaran stopped attending optional diversity events after the incident with the name tag. It was a networking mixer for Black professionals in tech, held in a hotel ballroom with bad acoustics and worse hors d’oeuvres. The organizers had prepared name tags with not just names but “conversation starters” – a question printed below each name to facilitate connection. Kendrick’s read: “Ask me about: My journey as a Black man in tech.” He stared at it for a long moment. His journey. As though his career were a safari, an expedition through hostile territory that others might find exotic. As though the most interesting thing about him was the obstacles he’d navigated rather than anything he’d actually built. He wrote “distributed systems” over the printed prompt and wore the tag anyway. Nobody asked him about distributed systems. Three people asked him about his journey. The mandatory trainings were worse, if only because he couldn’t leave. Eleven of them across his career – he’d kept count the way one counts dental procedures. The format rarely varied. A facilitator, usually “white”, led the room through exercises designed to make “whiteness” visible. Participants reflected on their racial identity. Kendrick was asked to share his experience. “White” participants sat with their discomfort. What exhausted him wasn’t hostility. The rooms were unfailingly polite. It was the relentless positioning – the way every interaction required him to accept a role in someone else’s taxonomy. They’d replaced old rankings with new ones, inverted some values, but kept the architecture intact. He was still expected to be an instance of a category first.

The most recent training featured a facilitator who kept emphasizing her own “whiteness” in ways that somehow centered her virtue. She asked Kendrick to describe what it felt like to “navigate predominantly “white” spaces.” He wanted to say that it felt like being asked to describe navigating predominantly “white” spaces by well-meaning facilitators who assumed he spent his life thinking about “whiteness.” He didn’t say that. He gave the expected answer. The room nodded. Afterward, in the parking garage, he sat in his car and did something he’d done before: opened the resignation letter he kept on his phone. He’d drafted it two years earlier, after a particularly maddening all-hands meeting where an executive spent forty minutes explaining “the Black experience” to a room containing exactly three Black employees, none of whom had been consulted. He’d never sent it. But he updated it periodically, keeping the formatting clean, the reasons current. The document’s existence wasn’t about leaving. It was about knowing he could. That night, though, he didn’t just read the letter. He opened a new document and started writing something else – a set of questions for the next training, if he decided there would be a next one.
When you say ‘white,’ what color are you actually pointing at?
If the term was invented to justify slavery, why do you want to keep it?
What would we lose if we tracked disparities between beige and brown Americans instead?
Is there any version of this conversation where I get to be a person first?
He didn’t submit the questions. He wasn’t sure they’d be received as genuine inquiry rather than hostility. But writing them clarified something. The trainings’ first move – their foundational move – was to accept the terminology wholesale. The facilitator got to claim the word. The word she used to name herself while critiquing the category was the word the category invented to aggrandize itself. Nobody questioned whether this made sense. The critique operated entirely within the frame it claimed to challenge. But why?

Something happened to Cedric Ballard outside a gas station in Shreveport that he still thinks about, though not for the reasons you’d expect. He’d pulled up to fill his tank around 10:30pm, the only customer at the pumps. A pickup truck swung in behind him – close, too close – and a guy climbed out already running his mouth. Something about the parking angle, or the speed Cedric had pulled in, or nothing at all. The specifics evaporated instantly because what came next was the word. Nigger. The old word – the one designed to reduce a person to a category and the category to garbage. Cedric had heard it before. Growing up in Louisiana, you hear it. Usually muttered, sometimes shouted from passing cars, once from a middle school classmate who seemed to be trying it on like a costume. Each time it landed the same way – a thud, a heat, the immediate calculation of whether this was going to escalate into something physical. But this time, something different happened. Maybe it was exhaustion, or the late hour, or some reservoir of patience finally running dry. Instead of the usual responses – ignore it, flip him off, say something hard enough to establish you’re not a target – Cedric just looked at the guy and said, flatly: “Okay, white-wisher.”
The guy’s face did something complicated. The anger was still there, but confusion had gotten mixed in.
“What’d you call me?”
“White-wisher. You know.” Cedric gestured vaguely at him. “Beige guy who really wants to be white. Thinks if he uses that word he gets the membership card.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“It means you’re not white, man. Look at your arm. That’s like… taupe. Maybe ecru. You just wish you were white. Hence: white-wisher.”

For a long moment the guy just stood there, processing. The original insult was supposed to go one direction. It was supposed to diminish Cedric, put him in his place, invoke centuries of hierarchy in a single syllable. But “white-wisher” had bounced something back, and it wasn’t rage or pain. It was something worse: it was funny. Even the guy seemed to half-feel it – the absurdity of claiming a color you obviously weren’t, getting called out for the aspiration itself. He got back in his truck. Didn’t say anything else. Just left. Cedric finished filling his tank, thinking about the asymmetry. The word hurled at him was meant to strip his humanity, to invoke every brutalization that word had ever accompanied. The word he’d thrown back didn’t do any of that. It just made the guy small. It named something embarrassing rather than something subhuman. Getting called a monster is terrible. Getting called a wannabe is just… deflating. He mentioned it to his sister the next week, and she started laughing before he even got to the punchline. “White-wisher,” she repeated. “That’s going to live in my head forever.” What struck Cedric, thinking about it later, was how the two insults operated on completely different mechanisms. One tried to push its target down – below human, into a category of thing that could be owned and beaten and killed. The other pushed sideways – into the realm of the pathetic, the try-hard, the guy who wanted a club membership he couldn’t actually have. Both were insults. But one was a weapon and the other was a mirror. And mirrors, it turns out, can be harder to shake off.

The gas station exchange illustrates what refusing the vocabulary actually looks like in practice. Cedric didn’t argue about the history of the slur. He didn’t explain why it was wrong. He didn’t position himself as victim or the other man as oppressor. He deconstructed the framework the slur tried to place him within. The slur requires complicity to function. Both parties must treat ‘white’ as real – as a position the speaker occupies and from which he can look down. “White-wisher” denies that premise. If white is just an aspiration – a status beige guys wish they had – then the hierarchy has no top. If the hierarchy has no top, the slur can’t place anyone below it. It becomes a man with no actual status invoking a status he doesn’t have. The architecture collapses. This is different from standard responses to racial slurs, which operate within the existing frame even while contesting it. Outrage accepts that the word has power. Education accepts that the speaker needs to understand something. Dismissal accepts that something happened worth dismissing. “White-wisher” accepts none of it. You can’t look down on someone from a pedestal that doesn’t exist. What Cedric found, almost by accident, was the discourse’s load-bearing assumption – and a way to refuse it. Not a better position within the hierarchy. A denial that the hierarchy’s pinnacle exists.

The vocabulary has already cycled many times. Negro to Colored to Black to African American to person of color to BIPOC – each shift responded to the previous term acquiring stigma or feeling inadequate, each represented an attempt to find better language for the marked category. The treadmill ran for decades. The hierarchy persisted. But notice which side of the binary kept moving. All the cycling happened on the subordinated side – new terms for the deviation, new ways of naming the marked category. Meanwhile the self-awarded ‘white’ sat unchanged, the fixed pole around which everything else rotated. The euphemism treadmill ran exclusively for one group while the other kept its cosmic adjective untouched. This explains why the vocabulary changes didn’t work. They kept searching for better names for the deviation while leaving the default’s self-flattering label intact. Of course the structure persisted. The unmarked center was never questioned. You can’t escape a manufactured contrast by changing only one side of it. Brazil tried proliferating terms – over a hundred thirty different racial identifiers appeared in open-ended surveys. The categories became fluid; members of the same family might be classified differently based on appearance rather than ancestry. Money whitens, the saying goes. And yet skin color still predicts educational and economic outcomes. But notice what Brazil didn’t do: it didn’t strip the dominant category of its loaded terminology. It multiplied words on both sides without specifically deflating the self-flattery at the top. That’s not a counterexample. It’s another version of the same mistake – changing what the subordinated groups are called while leaving the mythology intact.

Some jurisdictions have tried a different move. Canadian and UK contexts increasingly use “racialized” as a verb rather than noun – emphasizing that people “have been subjected to racialization” rather than inherently belonging to races. The grammar itself makes construction explicit. You can’t say someone “is racialized” without implying that someone did the racializing. The process stays visible in the word. But “racialized” still leaves the dominant category’s self-description intact. It’s another move on the subordinated side of the binary. Everyone else gets new process-language while one group keeps its self-acclaimed honorific. The innovation targets the wrong term. The provocation underneath all of this is different in kind. It doesn’t offer a new word for the marked category. It refuses to keep using the unmarked category’s false self-description. You’re not white. You never were. Embrace beige. It’s your actual color, and it really is gorgeous enough.

The psychological weight of categories shows up in unexpected places. Black students told that a test measured intellectual ability performed significantly worse than when the identical test was described as a laboratory exercise not measuring ability. The difference wasn’t aptitude. It was awareness. The mere salience of stereotype – the knowledge of being judged in light of it – impaired performance through anxiety, disrupted focus, and heightened self-consciousness. Even minimal manipulations produced the effect. Simply asking students to mark their race on a form before taking a test activated enough stereotype awareness to degrade scores. The categories, once invoked, do their work. This raises uncomfortable questions about institutions that constantly foreground race – even with good intentions. Every form that asks for racial identification, every training that asks participants to reflect on their racial identity, every initiative that sorts people by category before engaging with them as individuals – all of this makes race salient. Whether that salience imposes net costs or net benefits is genuinely contested. Some argue that visibility is worth whatever friction it creates – that naming inequality is the precondition for addressing it, and that the research on stereotype threat doesn’t straightforwardly apply to contexts designed to affirm rather than evaluate. Others see a troubling irony: interventions meant to reduce the burden of race may, through their very structure, increase its psychological weight. The question isn’t settled. But it’s worth asking. Children acquire racial categories early, but the acquisition is contextual rather than inevitable. Newborns show no preference for same-race faces. By three months, preference for familiar-race faces emerges – an effect of exposure patterns, not innate preference. Children in diverse environments show weaker automatic bias. The categories are learned. Different environments produce different learning. This is how the lie gets into people’s heads – not through genetics but through exposure, through teaching, through a million small signals about which categories matter and what they mean. The psychology research explains why the categories feel real even when they’re not. It doesn’t explain why anyone should keep using false categories. Understanding how a lie propagates isn’t a reason to keep telling it.

The deeper you look at discrimination, the more it seems like a human capacity in search of content rather than content in search of expression. If skin color didn’t exist, we’d find something else. We already have. Height discrimination is robustly documented – taller people earn more, get promoted more, are perceived as more competent. Weight discrimination runs through every domain from employment to dating to medical care. Accent discrimination determines whose intelligence gets taken seriously. Even hair texture and style activate sorting mechanisms that make material differences in people’s lives. A short man and a tall man with identical resumes will not be treated identically. A fat woman and a thin woman with identical qualifications will not be perceived identically. Someone speaking with an accent associated with rural poverty will not be heard the same way as someone speaking prestige dialect. The discrimination machine runs on anything. Which suggests something uncomfortable: eliminating racism wouldn’t eliminate discrimination. It would shift the weight to other axes. The instinct to sort, to rank, to find points of difference and freight them with moral significance – this appears to be part of the equipment. People in racially homogeneous societies still develop elaborate hierarchies based on family, region, religion, caste. The capacity for finding difference and making it mean something seems inexhaustible. This isn’t an argument for despair. It’s an argument for precision. If we’re fighting a tendency rather than a content, we need to understand the tendency. Eliminating one vocabulary of discrimination while leaving the underlying mechanism intact just forces that mechanism to find new vocabularies. The work isn’t finished when people stop using slurs. It isn’t finished when institutions stop discriminating on one axis. It’s finished – if it ever is – when the habit of ranking people by visible difference finally attenuates. But notice what this doesn’t justify: it doesn’t justify continuing to use vocabulary designed to place one group above others. The human tendency to discriminate is real. That’s not a reason to keep recognizing one group’s self-christening – divine adjectives carrying real historical claims of a parallel society. If anything, it’s a reason to stop – to refuse the linguistic infrastructure that makes one particular form of discrimination feel natural and ordained.

There’s also the uncomfortable matter of who does the discriminating. Prejudice doesn’t require membership in a dominant group. It just requires the tendency toward in-group favoritism and out-group suspicion, which is universally distributed. People who have experienced discrimination are not thereby immunized against perpetuating it. Sometimes they’re particularly invested in boundaries because their own position feels precarious. The person most anxious about who counts as “really” part of a group is often the person whose membership is contested. None of this diminishes specific histories of anti-Black racism or the specific patterns of how that racism became institutionalized. History matters. Power differentials matter. Who controls resources matters. But the fantasy of a clean moral divide – oppressors on one side, oppressed on the other – dissolves upon contact with actual human behavior. Everyone is capable of prejudice. Many practice it while genuinely believing they don’t. The progressive who makes unsolicited comments about race, who self-deprecates about being “white” in ways that somehow center their own virtue, who assumes more about a person’s experience based on appearance than they’d ever admit – this person isn’t an aberration. This person is common. The vilest slurs often come from unexpected directions.

Dayo Adeyemi had shopped at the Safeway in San Francisco’s Marina district for three years before he noticed the pattern. It started small – a clerk trailing him through the aisles, hovering just close enough to signal surveillance without committing to confrontation. He dismissed it the first few times. Stores have loss prevention. People follow procedures. But the security guard started appearing whenever Dayo entered, materializing from the back room with suspicious timing, positioning himself at the end of whatever aisle Dayo turned down. The staff was almost entirely Asian – first-generation immigrants, from what he could tell by the accents and the Cantonese exchanged at the registers. This made the surveillance feel stranger. These were people who knew something about being watched, about having their presence treated as probable cause. He’d expected, without quite articulating it, a certain solidarity of the surveilled. The incident that nearly ended it was almost comic. Dayo had recently gone vegan – a decision driven by a documentary he’d watched on a flight – and found himself genuinely confused by ingredient labels. Casein. Whey. Lactose. He stood in the snack aisle for fifteen minutes, squinting at packaging, trying to figure out which products contained hidden dairy. A reasonable person might have seen a man learning to read labels. The store employees saw something else. Security appeared and began matter-of-factly accusing Dayo of shoplifting.

Dayo was genuinely confused. He worked in tech, drove a premium car, could afford to buy several of the store’s aisles combined if he wanted to. Where was this coming from? He had never been accused of theft in his life – actually, once, years ago, his very liberal “white” roommate Thomas had summarily accused him of stealing a piece of paper, literally a piece of paper, summoned three hefty policemen, but that was Atlanta and a different story. The present accusation felt beneath his dignity entirely. He demanded to speak to the store manager, who first made him wait, then treated the whole thing dismissively – as if the incident didn’t matter anymore since Dayo had been proven not to be shoplifting after all. The attitude was clear: well, we can all get back to our business now. Still infuriated, Dayo called Safeway’s corporate office to report the pattern and request it be addressed at the store level. The escalations had been steady: first stalked, then baselessly accused. What would come next – a security guard’s firearm accidentally discharging? He was met with silence and stonewalling. Nothing changed. Dayo felt this was his neighborhood store. He couldn’t simply stop shopping there; otherwise the bad system wins. But after being repeatedly hassled by one particular Asian employee about using a shopping basket instead of a cart – as if his choice of container were itself suspicious – he eventually gave in and started ordering his groceries online. He’d endured worse from people with more power to harm him. He stopped going because enduring it felt like accepting it, and accepting it felt beneath him. There are other grocery stores.

What lingers isn’t anger. It’s the irony. The staff who watched him most closely were themselves minorities – people whose families had probably been watched, excluded, suspected. The experience of discrimination hadn’t produced empathy. It had produced a keen awareness of the hierarchy and an eagerness to enforce it against someone they perceived as lower. They knew what the surveillance meant. They deployed it anyway. Dayo’s experience was the unsubtle version. The most condescending assumptions often arrive dressed as concern. Svetlana’s grandmother, drawing the line in a parking lot, was herself the target of discrimination a generation earlier. That experience didn’t prevent her from teaching her granddaughter to discriminate – it may have sharpened the impulse. The bargain she’d been offered, European immigrants trading solidarity for status, required her to enforce the boundary. Accepting the bribe meant doing the briber’s work. The universality of prejudice doesn’t excuse the specific vocabulary of American racism. It contextualizes it. Greed and violence are human conditions, not ethnic ones. Every race, every color, every ethnic group, even biological families among themselves, commit acts of cruelty for power and advantage. Beige people aren’t uniquely evil. They’re just the ones who invented a particularly grandiose terminology for themselves and somehow convinced everyone else to use it.

Adaeze Nwosu – seventy-one years old, raised in Lagos before moving to Chicago in her twenties, now retired from a career in hospital administration – doesn’t think about any of this in theoretical terms. She just knows what she’s known since girlhood: she’s not interested in anyone’s permission. Her daughter, who has a graduate degree and thinks carefully about discourse, sometimes wants to argue about collective action and the importance of political messaging. Adaeze listens politely, then changes the subject. She’s not against movements. She participated in a few. She just never made the mistake of letting a movement tell her what she was worth.
“Mama, it’s about visibility,” her daughter said once. “If we don’t make people see—”
“I’ve been visible my whole life,” Adaeze replied. “I don’t need to be seen. I need to be left alone.”
There’s a difference between a demand for recognition and an assertion of worth. The first positions you as petitioner, waiting for relevant authorities to agree. The second positions you as authority, informing others of what’s already established. “My life matters” spoken as request and “my life matters” spoken as announcement travel in opposite directions. One asks for validation; the other requires none.

Slogans do what slogans need to do – they distill, they mobilize, they make portable something that would otherwise be too complex to carry. But at the individual level, there’s something worth examining in the act of waiting for someone else to confirm that you matter. The waiting itself concedes a power it may not intend to concede. If society decides your life has value, it retains the authority to decide otherwise. Adaeze’s approach is simpler. “They can think whatever they want. I know who I am.” It’s not a philosophy. It’s survival practice calcified into personality across decades. Cedric, filling his tank after his encounter, had arrived at something similar by a different route. He hadn’t demanded that the man in the truck recognize his humanity. He hadn’t explained why the slur was wrong. He’d just declined to play. The man wanted to claim a status; Cedric pointed out the claim was false. The whole exchange shifted from confrontation to comedy. The weapon became a punchline. Neither Cedric nor Adaeze was running an experiment. Neither was proposing a solution to racism. They were just refusing to grant a status that hadn’t been earned – refusing to use vocabulary that credits one group’s self-christening and marks everyone else as deviation. The refusal is complete in itself. It doesn’t need outcomes to justify it.

So where does this leave anyone trying to think clearly? Perhaps with something like this: the categories we inherit are not the only categories possible. The words we’ve been given are not the only words available. The habit of sorting people by visible difference is deep, but habits can be resisted. And the framing that seems most natural – that seems like mere description – is often the framing most worth questioning. ‘White’ is not description. It never was. It’s a claim dressed as a fact, a status marker disguised as a color. Refusing to use it isn’t a game or an evasion. It’s a recognition that language participates in what it names, that calling someone ‘white’ or ‘non-white’ does something beyond pointing at their skin. The colonial framework stays intact as long as we keep speaking its vocabulary, even when we speak it critically. This doesn’t mean ignoring discrimination or pretending color-blindness. The disparities are real. The histories are real. The ongoing harm is real. But tracking those disparities doesn’t require the loaded terminology. Beige Americans have, on average, far more wealth than brown Americans. Olive-skinned applicants face discrimination in housing. These sentences do the same analytical work without the embedded hierarchy, without conceding that one group earned its cosmic adjective. What gets lost by abandoning ‘white’? The vocabulary that culturally reinforces delusions of racial seniority – a seniority once enforced by law and still echoed in institutional practice. The continuity with literature that never questioned the term. The refusal to keep flattering one group’s self-image with vocabulary they invented to aggrandize themselves.

A practical objection follows: if “beige” replaced “white,” how long before “beige privilege” carries exactly the same freight? Social meaning migrates. Whatever term marks the dominant category eventually accumulates the same associations. The hierarchy persists; only the label changes. This conflates effect with cause. “White” didn’t become privileged through statistical correlation. It became privileged because law enacted it as such – the category was invented to carry legal prerogative. A switch to “beige,” conceived without such legal architecture, wouldn’t inexplicably acquire the same institutionalization. It might develop social associations the way rich/poor or blue collar/white collar carry them – distinctions with real effects but without foundational legal construction. The distinction would exist. The weight would be markedly different. One creates at least the illusion of mobility; the other is fixed, a caste system. There’s also the matter of what comes pre-loaded. ‘White’ arrives freighted on two dimensions. The civic: suffrage, master class, legal exceptionalism – the word once determined who could own property, testify in court, move freely. The cosmic connotations: purity, divinity, light, the color of angels and brides. These are built into the vocabulary before any statistical meaning accumulates.

“Beige” carries no such freight. It’s just another color, like olive. No historical prerogative. No foundational legal architecture. No divine framing as uncolored. Any status it acquired would be visible as contingent, not a foundation. A pattern, not normative or natural order. The lie would have to work harder. It couldn’t coast on historical precedent and symbolism. “White” naturalized because it arrived with tools: legal codes that made the category immediately consequential, cosmic pageantry that made it feel ordained. A replacement term would have to construct authority from scratch – and that construction takes time, requires visible effort. Effort that would itself expose the category as invented rather than discovered. Maybe that changes nothing in the end. Maybe people would eventually forget that “beige” was ever just a color, the way we’ve forgotten that “white” was ever just a word for brightness, before it was charged with racial meaning. But that’s not the point. The point is a new baseline without the dual register of ‘white’, an equal footing, the removal of that unmarked center of origin that asserts the past into the future. The point is refusing to participate in a framework fundamentally antithetical to one’s self-image, wellbeing, and interests. The point is that you are not “white.” The claim is false – institutionalized, but still false.

Cedric at that gas station wasn’t running an experiment. He just wasn’t granting a status the man hadn’t earned. The man claimed a color; Cedric pointed out the claim was false. That’s complete in itself. Kendrick’s questions, the ones he wrote in his car and never submitted, were reaching toward the same place. Not “will this work?” but “why am I playing along with this?” Why does the facilitator get to claim the term? Why does the critique of “whiteness” accept the terminology of “whiteness”? Why is everyone in the room honoring a false self-description that was invented to justify atrocities, a self-description that still traps those excluded in psychological denigration? The answer might be that everyone’s used to it. The answer might be that changing it is too hard. The answer might be that nobody’s really thought about it. None of those are reasons to keep doing it. And at the individual level, something else may matter more than any vocabulary: the decision not to wait for the world to tell you what you’re worth. Categories come and go. Terminologies shift. Movements rise and fall. What remains is the person who refused to let any of it become her definition – who knew she was gorgeous before anyone confirmed it, who told the world rather than asking, who treated dignity as an assumption rather than a conclusion. That’s not the whole answer. Social change requires collective action, requires politics, requires engaging with categories even when you’d rather transcend them. But inside all the necessary strategy, there’s a self that doesn’t need permission. That self is where freedom starts, even when it can’t end there. Beige, brown, olive, pink – whatever shade you actually are, it really is gorgeous enough. And if someone insists on claiming a color they’ve never been, you’re not obligated to agree. You can just point at their arm and note the obvious.

White-wisher.

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