They ask me if I’m proud to be white.
And I pause—
Not from shame,
But because I’ve learned not to answer
Without first remembering what came before me.
Proud of what?
Of conquest dressed up as progress?
Of freedom that came with a foot on someone else’s neck?
Of laws that wrote Blackness into *******
And whiteness into power?
My people wrote the rules,
Then broke the spirits
Of the ones they feared would rise.
They burned books
To keep minds dark.
They banned reading
Because education meant rebellion.
And rebellion from the enslaved
Was labeled violence,
While the chains weren’t.
They tore families apart,
Sold children like stock,
Then centuries later
Wonder why Black homes
Are fighting to stay whole.
They unleashed dogs on marchers,
Sprayed fire hoses at children
Just for asking to be seen.
This is how I remember.
I remember Emmett Till,
Fourteen years old,
Lynched for a lie.
I remember Tulsa, 1921,
Where success was a threat
Black Wall Street turned to smoke and ruin.
I remember redlining,
Where maps bled prejudice
And banks drew lines
That locked Black families out of futures.
I remember the war on drugs,
Where addiction in white skin
Was a health crisis,
But in Black skin,
A crime.
I remember George Floyd,
Face pressed to pavement,
A knee on his neck
For nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds
A public execution
That still needed a trial
To prove what we all saw.
This is how I remember.
And today
The Confederate flag still flies
On porches,
On plates,
On shoulders
Like a badge of glory.
Some still preach “heritage”
But won’t name what it honors
A war to keep humans in chains.
They talk of “states’ rights”
As if those rights weren’t
The right to own a man.
In some parts of this country,
They still act like the South won
Like their freedoms were stolen
When the shackles came off someone else.
And racism?
It didn’t die.
It just learned how to dress.
It put on a suit,
Picked up a microphone,
And ran for office.
It showed up in school curriculums
That call slavery a migration,
Or erase Black names from the pages.
It whispers at kitchen tables,
It votes in silence,
It marches in khakis,
And calls itself “tradition.”
This is how I remember.
I am a white man.
I didn’t own slaves.
But I live in the house they built.
And every brick
Carries the weight of what was done to build it.
I’m not proud of that.
But I won’t pretend it isn’t mine to reckon with.
I am proud of my shame.
Because shame means I still have a conscience.
Because if I can feel it,
I can face it.
And if I can face it,
Maybe I can change what comes next.
I remember
Because forgetting
Is the first act of violence.
Because pretending
Is how this all keeps going.
We don’t heal
By rewriting history.
We heal
By learning to carry it honestly.
This is how I remember
And this time,
I refuse to look away.
Author’s Note:
I am a white man.
Fourteen generations here in America
I sought my family history
I choose to remember all of our history—
not just the parts that make us proud,
but the parts that make us pause.
I refuse to wash it away.
Because truth, no matter how painful,
is the only path to justice.
I’m woke