This acknowledgment is not about self-hatred or performative white guilt, but rather a reckoning with my history, that I have either benefited from someone else’s hardship or gotten benefits of the doubt along the way that others have not. To be white is to be unaware that most things in the world work for me most of the time, because they were ordered, designed, and enforced by my people. My presence is never considered extraordinary by walking into the door of a church, a school, a neighborhood, a shop. I belong; everything around me confirms my belonging; and because I belong so seamlessly in this society it is easy for me to lose perspective on my surroundings. Instead of the second sight DuBois describes, I am plagued by a kind of thrice-blinding, where my community loyalties constitute three, largely unified, powerful narratives; white, southern, and evangelical. Each narrative historically reinforces one another. Thus, sometimes we feel that challenging one narrative constitutes a rejection of the communities in which many of us have been raised, and becoming homeless in a sense is too-terrifying a prospect to entertain.
From “Know Your Place: Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World” by Justin R. Phillips