There was always something that felt wrong about checking the “White” box on forms, something that made my stomach tighten when people casually grouped me into that category.
For years, I couldn’t articulate why – I just knew it felt like a betrayal, though of what exactly, I wasn’t sure.
As a child obsessed with history, I devoured every book I could find, but something always felt off about the narratives I encountered. History was presented like a grand march toward European “enlightenment,” with the rest of the world’s rich tapestry of human experience reduced to occasional footnotes or exotic curiosities. It was as if the storytellers were saying, “Wait until Europe arrives – that’s when the real story begins.”
Even as a kid, this felt deeply wrong, though I lacked the vocabulary to express why.
The punk scene in Pittsburgh offered some language for this discomfort, some frameworks for questioning established narratives. But in many ways, it only added layers of confusion to my already complex relationship with identity.
It wasn’t until I found my way to ceremony, to Native spiritual practices and healing traditions, that pieces began falling into place. In those sacred spaces, identity wasn’t about checking boxes or proving authenticity – it was about honoring the fullness of who we are and all the stories that made us possible.
Then I encountered Emma Dabiri’s “What White People Can Do Next,” and suddenly, clarity struck like lightning.
She articulates something I’d felt but never fully understood: “whiteness” isn’t a natural category or cultural identity – it’s a colonial construct designed specifically as a tool of division and conquest. As Dabiri explains:
“People racialized as ‘white’ should be as keen to escape the concept’s pernicious grasp as anybody else… it is the call to abolish a concept, an idea, an ideology, one that was unambiguously created to divide people.”
The irony doesn’t escape me that my Scotch-Irish ancestors, who themselves were colonized and oppressed, would eventually be absorbed into this construct of “whiteness.” The same happened with the Polish, the Italians, and so many others.
This racial category served as what Dabiri calls “a persuasive instrument for mobilizing people to act against their own interests and to keep these types in power.”
What strikes me most profound in Dabiri’s work is her insight that mainstream antiracist narratives often inadvertently reinforce the very construct they aim to dismantle.
Instead of challenging the fundamental fiction of “white people” as a category, much of this work focuses on making “white people nicer, through a combination of begging, demanding, cajoling, and imploring.”
But what if the real work isn’t about reforming whiteness, but about dissolving it entirely?
This dissolution doesn’t mean erasing or denying European ancestry – quite the opposite.
Rejecting “whiteness” as a category allows us to honor our ancestors in their full specificity and complexity.
My Scotch-Irish forebears weren’t “white” – they were farmers and storytellers, rebels and survivors, carriers of their own rich traditions and ways of being. The same is true for my Polish and German ancestors. Each lineage holds its own wisdom, its own songs, its own ways of relating to the sacred.
Dabiri reminds us that:
“The same forces that have a disregard for black life, for the lives of the indigenous, for the marginalized, for the lives of women, are the same forces who disregard the life of the Earth itself.”
When we begin to see how these systems of categorization and control serve to separate us – from each other, from our ancestors, from the Earth itself – we can begin to imagine new ways of being together.
This journey has taught me that decolonizing isn’t just about changing political systems or economic structures – though that work is crucial. It’s also about decolonizing our very understanding of who we are.
It’s about reclaiming the specific stories, traditions, and wisdom of our ancestors from the homogenizing fiction of “whiteness.”
It’s about understanding that true liberation isn’t about making the colonial table more inclusive – it’s about building new tables altogether, ones that honor the full complexity of human experience and connection.
As Dabiri says, we need “a new, far more expansive, approach to understanding what we want to achieve.”
For me, that means continuing to explore and honor all my ancestral lines – Kiowa, Scotch-Irish, German, Polish, Swedish – not as static categories but as living stories that teach me different ways of being human.
It means recognizing that the path forward isn’t about perfecting systems of division, but about remembering older, deeper ways of belonging – to each other, to the Earth, to the sacred web of life that holds us all.

Writing a bio is always hard. What to pin down in a life well lived? My background is a blend of many things, always finding the intersection of creative and analytical. Mostly I’ve made indie films, organized many community events, more recently worked in tech startups. I also spend a lot of time learning new skills as well as deeply connecting with people through conversation and shared experiences.
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