Thank you for taking the time to read and respond. Although it is hard to tell for sure, I am assuming a sarcastic tone in your response -- suggesting that white-dominant culture does not exist in this situation, and that I am seeing something non-existent through my "woke"-tinted glasses. I probably will not convince you otherwise, no matter what I write, but I am taking the time to respond because I think your comment catches on some of my own internal response to the situation.

There is a part of me that doesn't believe that "whiteness" is a thing that operates in society. I certainly was raised to think of whiteness as a sort of the the "default state" of the culture. That white people don't have a single unique culture, but rather we have a multitude of cultures.

When any writer talks about "white people," the hair on the back of my neck bristles because part of me thinks "not all white people" and "white people is such a big category that it is meaningless."

It is possible that BIPOC folks see white people as monolith and react as such. And also possible that we don't see ourselves that way, and we are sometimes confused when they paint us with a broad brush. They see race and racism where we don't see it. Does that mean it doesn't exist?

I think that is the question that my original essay was trying to get at. Is there something about dominance hierarchies that operate in society that shifts depending one's place within the hierarchy? The shifting piece is that if a person is in the down place within the hierarchy, they look up at the people acting as if they are better than them as a monolith. So it is "all men" and "all white people" and "all straight people" to them. And to those in the dominant position, they look around and don't see a monoculture. They/we see ourselves as individuals.

I think our school has a culture and the people who make up that culture happen to be majority white. Within that culture, most of the people in positions of power are white. To white people, this might seem like a meaningless coincidence. So what? To anyone who is not white, it might seem meaningful.