I keep hearing a similar story. Someone steps into “privilege” work hoping to grow, and instead walks away feeling shamed and under attack, as if their identity is the problem. One reader online put it starkly:
“Yes. I have rejected CRT as an op that plays white guilt into destroying white culture. I began ‘unpacking my privilege’ a few years back, and was a good ways in when I realized what it was doing to my soul.”
This reaction is not rare. It might be easy to dismiss, but it points to something real that many people feel and rarely get to unpack in good faith.
Part of the confusion is that several different conversations get mashed together. Critical Race Theory started as a legal and academic lens for understanding how rules and institutions can reproduce inequality over time. What most people encountered, though, was a corporate and nonprofit curriculum about “unpacking privilege.” That’s not the same thing. Privilege theory, in practice, has too often turned systemic problems into personal rituals, which can leave people ashamed, defensive, or simply exhausted.
Even though almost every activist will tell you the point isn't to instill defensiveness, guilt or shame in people, that's often the unintended impact. Instead of inviting solidarity, for many, it accomplishes the exact opposite: pushing people toward defending “white culture” as a bunker, and quietly hardening the edges and realness of the white identity rather than questioning it.
Plenty of decolonial and anti-racist organizers have criticized the “check your privilege” approach for years. They argue it’s a liberal framework that manages feelings more than it changes power, and that it leaves the basic machinery of inequality untouched. When people sense this mismatch, they assume the whole project is a scam or an attack on their identity.
In what follows, I want to separate the concepts, explain why “whiteness” is not a heritage worth defending, and sketch a civic identity rooted in place, work, and our shared humanity. The goal isn’t to police language. It’s to build a politics that actually moves material power and expands freedom.
Where privilege-talk helps, and where it capsizes
At its best, privilege language points at something real: history leaves marks. Some of us move through doors others still find locked. Naming that can build empathy and sharpen our aim against bad policy.
But as a framework, “privilege-unpacking” often gets trapped in the mirror. It turns structural problems into personal homework. Corporations love it. Universities love it. HR loves it. Why? Because it individualizes what is systemic, drains rage into workshops, and leaves the profit machine humming. You can attend all the trainings you want and still have the same evictions, the same wage theft, the same private-prison contracts, the same war budgets, the same poisoned neighborhoods.
That is liberalism’s safety valve: manage vocabulary, not power. Change the brochure, keep the board.
If your gut told you that a shame regimen wasn’t freedom, good. That feeling is a compass. Just don’t let it swing you into the arms of another myth.
“White culture” isn’t a thing worth saving
The idea that CRT is “destroying white culture” assumes there’s a coherent thing called “white culture.” There isn’t. There are cultures: Appalachian, Cajun, Sicilian, Polish, Texan, Minnesotan, working-class mill towns, ranch country, skateboard crews, fiddle circles, farm kitchens. There are lineages and languages and foodways. None of these become truer when we pour them into the bucket labeled “white.”
“Whiteness” is not a heritage. It’s a political sorting hat invented to police borders of power. It was a deal: accept the label, get a rung up over someone else, and help protect the pyramid. That deal fractured multiracial worker coalitions then, and it still does. When we defend “whiteness,” we’re defending a code that keeps neighbors from seeing their common cause.
So no, you don’t have to let shame colonize your soul. But you also don’t need to fly a banner for a category built to keep us divided. Drop the guilt and the costume.
A different way to belong
We need identities that tie us to responsibilities, not hierarchies. Try these on:
- Place-based: steward of this watershed, this block, these trees, this school.
- Role-based: worker, renter, parent, grower, caretaker, builder, artist.
- Heritage-specific: Irish, German, Sicilian, etc., in honest conversation with what our ancestors suffered and what they were conscripted to enforce.
- Value-based: democrat, small-d – someone committed to economic democracy, ecological sanity, mutual aid, and real consent in public life.
These are identities that ask you to show up. They don’t require performing purity. They require building power with people who don’t look like you, because your fates are braided.
What a liberatory politics looks like
If privilege scripts focus on the self, emancipatory politics changes the structure that shapes the self. A short, incomplete list:
- Decommodify the basics: housing, healthcare, energy, water. No one should be an income stream.
- Democratize the workplace: worker ownership and strong unions. Profit shared by the folks who create value.
- Public investment with public control: communities, not Wall Street, set the priorities for credit, land, and infrastructure.
- Demilitarize and repair: shrink the war machine, end the corporate carceral pipeline, and fund real safety – housing, treatment, education, green jobs.
- Ecological transition with justice at the center: clean air and water as rights, polluters pay, communities decide.
None of that requires you to flagellate yourself. All of it requires solidarity across the lines “whiteness” was designed to harden.
So what do you do with your discomfort?
Treat it as a signal. If “unpacking” turned into a ritual of self-negation, swap it for work that builds dignity:
- Join your tenant union or labor union. Organize a shop vote. Back a strike fund.
- Start a neighborhood mutual aid crew. Plant food. Fix bikes. Knock doors.
- Help start or support a worker co-op. Keep wealth circulating where it’s created.
- Run for school board or utility board on a platform of de-testing, de-policing, and community-owned power.
- Build independent media that tells truths the ad-driven outlets won’t touch.
You’ll notice none of this requires adopting a special dialect. It asks for time, courage, and neighbors.
A closing invitation
To the person that inspired this article: You were right to protect your soul. Let’s protect our neighbors’ bodies, homes, and futures, too. We don’t need the politics of guilt, and we don’t need the politics of “white pride.” We need the politics of shared power.
Trade the label for a lineage of solidarity.
Trade the workshop for a union meeting.
Trade the culture war for a culture worth living in, together.