Thank you for writing this post and others like it. As I engage with your writing, I am sure to make mistakes because of my big fat blind spots. I try to come from a point of curiosity. I love Medium, because I get to expose my own thinking to criticism. Please let me know if I am completely full of shit or even partly full of it.

I think whiteness is a bargain we (most white people) make with ourselves in order to have security within the capitalist system. We are born into the bargain, and we have to actively opt out if we don't want it.

I just watched the six episodes of "The White Lotus" on HBO with my partner [spoilers ahead]. I recommend it as a study of white people (at first I only saw it as a study of rich white people - but one character showed me the middle class point of view). I cringe to see the show, because they talk about race and class, both things we are not supposed to talk about.

In the show there is a newlywed couple on their honeymoon. The man is the epitome of white, male, owning-class privilege. His major plot line is that they didn't get the room his rich mom ordered and paid for and he is a man-baby about it. His wife Rachel comes from a middle class family, and she has been trying and failing to make a career a journalist. In the show, we learn that she may not be that great of a writer, but it is her thing. In the story arc, we watch Rachel come to the realization that she is a "trophy wife" and she tells her husband she has made a mistake by marrying him. She wants to be her own person and not be dependent on him for identity and security. They have a fight and he is an asshole and I am sure that she is going to leave him.

Rachel calls the one Black person on the show (spa manager Belinda), and in one of the best scenes of the show, Rachel unloads all of her existential insecurities on Belinda, who responds beautifully by not giving a f**k, at all. Up until that moment, I had seen Rachel and Belinda both as sympathetic characters who were treated like shit by rich people. But in that scene I saw Rachel ask Belinda to do her emotional work for her and save her. Belinda refused.

Rachel then does the unthinkable, and reunites with her asshole husband. She knows what she is doing. She has decided to try to keep Shane happy in exchange for security. She is unwilling to face the world of trying to make it as a mediocre journalist from a poor family. She has made the bargain, and it is a bargain that all middle class and working class white people have to make. We keep the rich white people happy and they give us security. We have to succeed on our own merit, but it is from a place of privilege. We don't acknowledge that privilege, but if we had to do without it, we would miss it. Rachel embodies that moment when she had a choice between living a life of privilege and facing insecurity, and she made the choice that most white people make, to keep her privilege. Most of us don't have such a moment, but we definitely keep choosing to play our parts in the system.

I think under capitalism, for middle class white people, we have this idea that if we participate as individuals, we will save enough money and build enough equity in our investments to have security. If we step off the path, we have an existential crisis, like Rachel, because, without whiteness, we don't have a network of family or friends to economically rely on. Our participation is based on the dire consequences of non-participation.