Opinion | What happens after our shock fades?

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I (Delta) am a lifelong resident of the Twin Cities. Over the past month I have been spending mornings protesting at the Whipple Building, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents gather before heading into the streets. I spend my weekends serving as a legal observer. I am not an anomaly. I am white and a part of a multiracial coalition that is guided by the historical lessons of Black and Indigenous resistance.

My co-author (Robin) does not live in Minneapolis but has been researching white socialization for decades. She has documented how white Americans are taught to see racism as an aberration, an ugly interruption of an otherwise noble national story. The line is repeated reflexively after every racial reckoning: This is not who we are. But for Black and brown people in this country, racism has never been a deviation. It is the throughline.

What white Americans experience as situational moral rupture, communities of color recognize as historical continuity — as systemic. Having learned from history what comes next, we are writing to our fellow white people with a direct challenge: How do we sustain our engagement beyond the current crisis and build a foundation that is redemptive rather than just reactive?

The U.S. was not haphazardly shaped by momentary aberrations of racism. From stolen land to stolen labor, from chattel slavery to racialized wealth extraction, this system is not evidence of national failure; it is evidence of design. The propaganda project of America tells us that history should not be uncomfortable and that our stated values outweigh the evidence of our actions. The recent slate of executive orders underscores that project.

History textbooks celebrate the Civil War as a turning point, a tragic but reparatory chapter in which the nation confronted its sins and chose justice. But this story collapses under even modest scrutiny. The brief period that followed, known as Reconstruction, demonstrated what was possible. Black men were elected to Congress. Public education systems were developed. Black people built businesses, accumulated land and bought homes. But as author Carol Anderson documents, every inch of Black progress has been met by a backlash of white rage.

Every chapter of racial progress since has been followed by retrenchment. Emancipation gave way to Black Codes. Civil rights legislation gave way to mass incarceration. The election of the first Black president has been followed by the most overt resurgence of white nationalism in modern history. Each time, white America insists it is shocked and awakened.

What sustains this cycle is not ignorance of history, but a lie so deeply embedded in white consciousness that it feels like common sense: the belief that equality is a zero-sum game. If they gain safety, access or dignity, we must lose something essential in return.

Civil rights advocate Heather McGhee has argued that zero-sum thinking is a central part of the machine of systemic racism, convincing white people that domination is protection, that hoarded power is security, that justice for others is theft from us. And so white Americans have repeatedly chosen systems that harm their own material conditions — underfunded schools, limited access to health care, weakened labor protections and decaying infrastructure — so long as those systems preserve racial hierarchy. White people are left with an identity without substance, an identity rooted not in shared humanity or ethical coherence, but in contrast and control. It answers the question Who are you? with the shallow refrain: Not them. And it demands constant maintenance: fear, resentment, apathy and willful ignorance.

The war we are in today is a war over memory, meaning and moral responsibility. Over whose votes count, whose histories are taught, whose bodies are protected by law, and whose lives are framed as disposable in the service of control and profit. And once again, the cost is being borne disproportionately by Black, Indigenous, immigrant and brown communities, while white people debate optics, tone and whether this all feels “too divisive.”

White Americans have been taught to believe that equality requires our loss. History shows the opposite: that it is the hoarding of power that has impoverished us all. The question now is not whether justice will cost white people something; it already has. The question is whether we are willing to stop paying that cost in moral bankruptcy, democratic collapse and generational harm, or whether we will continue to sacrifice the future in order to preserve a lie.