Dinner and Drinks at the White Privilege Party

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

What moral obligations do White people have, especially White men, to risk death when protecting the powerless in American society? This question confronted me this week when I answered a social media question. Somebody described her White friend in semi-rural Pennsylvania trying to organize a No Kings protest. She wanted to incorporate conventional anti-fascist songs and chants, but her White co-organizers feared becoming “too confrontational” and alienating their neighbors.

I admit I fumbled my answer. I said something mealy-mouthed about regions where somebody arriving with a Gadsden flag and a gun was entirely likely. Progressives living in broadly conservative areas know that those threatening our organized activities face few consequences. Just last month, in my state, an adult man attacked a line of protesting high school students—literal children—and local prosecutors declined to file charges.

Somebody answered my response by saying I failed to understand the Black American experience. Which, as a White cishet man, I probably do. This respondent pointed out that Black Americans face violent pushback for even the most anodyne protest. In fairness, I’ve shared enough protest space with Black and Hispanic people to have witnessed this firsthand, but like anything merely witnessed, that’s not the same as experience.

In all things, I strive to remain fair and broad-minded, and if I’m wrong, I want to amend my ways. So I’ve thought about this response. I could, if I wanted, mumble something about the limits of social media. Especially on platforms which cap character counts, like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, it’s impossible to make nuanced arguments. Conditional experiences, including the Black, queer, disabled, or womanist experience, will get elided.

But that’s merely an excuse. Several deeper issues conspired to reach this moment. First, humans naturally desire to stay alive. My sense of moral outrage at persistent American racism arose because racialized violence contravenes the human desire to survive, and places a sliding scale on human life. If some people deserve to remain alive more than others, autocrats could eventually use that relative deserving against me. Or you.

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

This isn’t new or unique. The “Women and children first” ethic made famous on the RMS Titanic was written after literally no women or children survived the SS Arctic disaster. Men on board wanted to survive so badly that they literally elbowed smaller, weaker women aside. Human-made moral codes like chivalry, law of the sea, and bushido generally arise to restrain powerful people’s tendency to value their lives over others.

Honestly, I don’t have to die for justice. As a White man, I could passively acquiesce, and pay little price. This, then, is the obverse of my respondent’s claim that Black people live with constant threats of violence. If White people can walk away from threats and survive, they will walk away. They won’t persevere if their lives are jeopardized, unless the threat of leaving is worse.

Forgive me bringing up old stuff, but here’s where Kyle Rittenhouse enters the discussion. Even I misunderstood the meaning when it happened, focusing on the red-herring language of “self-defense.” But Kyle Rittenhouse’s real lesson was that, if White people stand up for Black lives, human law won’t protect them. White lives don’t matter if they don’t prostrate themselves before a White political apparatus.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ says: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (15:13 KJV) But Jesus never says anything unless its opposite flits through the common ethos. If we think morality should result in material reward, then dying for others is a failure. Only when justice is communal, not individual, does dying for the cause become an accomplishment.

And right now, in America’s White spaces, communitarian justice just doesn’t exist. That’s why private-sector labor unions are dying, protests are special occasions, and, as Charles M. Blow writes, White people can abandon racial justice actions when the weather becomes harsh. Community justice, once a shared value in America’s factories and farms, has dwindled as those spaces have become racialized, and White people live in atomized suburbs and single-family homes.

Under such conditions, asking White people to risk death simply because it’s right, is a non-starter. Not until our political, religious, and social leaders reclaim a vision of shared consequence, will that change. Unfortunately, that won’t happen while voters, congregants, and citizens don’t reward it—the ultimate circular reasoning. The feedback loop won’t break until, as the fash inevitably do, they turn against the people who first gave them power.

To Be Continued