Institutional racism in America is peculiar. Conventionally, the study of racism focuses on how it emotionally, socially, and materially affects targeted racial groups—especially people of color. In the United States, beginning with chattel slavery, a racial hierarchy was woven into the nation’s social and political fabric. This history has resulted in Black and Brown Americans being treated as second-class citizens—or outright denied full citizenship rights.

But with the country’s shifting demographics, it is time to broaden the study of racism to include its corrosive effects on White Americans. Specifically, we must examine how institutionalized racism, rooted in white supremacy, imparts a false sense of superiority and fails to prepare White people to function in an increasingly pluralistic society. This dysfunction amounts to a kind of inward oppression—spiritual and psychological—that weighs heavily on white working-class and blue-collar communities.

This is not to say that white oppression mirrors the external, systemic abuse suffered by Black and Brown people. But it does suggest that both forms of oppression have left lasting damage—damage that must be addressed if the United States is ever to become truly united.

In 2011, the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy published Robin DiAngelo’s influential paper, White Fragility, which defines this phenomenon as the inability of White people to tolerate even minimal racial stress, triggering defensive responses aimed at restoring racial comfort. While DiAngelo’s work documents the signs of White Fragility, it stops short of naming its deeper cause. I would argue that this fragility is a symptom of institutional racism itself—a repression that shields White people from the painful work of reckoning with racial inequality.

Whereas people of color fight an oppression that is external and brutally visible, White Americans struggle against an internalized oppression—one harder to name and therefore harder to dismantle. White supremacy and white oppression are symbiotic: because many Whites unconsciously fear experiencing the same abuse minorities have endured, they resist efforts toward equality. To many, equality is a zero-sum game—resources gained by people of color are seen as resources lost by Whites.

Historically, Jim Crow laws shielded Southern Whites from the realities of classism by concentrating government aid and resources in White hands. Black and Brown citizens were systematically denied public investment in education, housing, and infrastructure. White supremacy was thus institutionalized not only through explicit racism but also through the selective allocation of public goods.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act disrupted this arrangement by mandating that government resources be distributed equally. Yet rather than expand budgets to meet this new demand, many state legislatures simply spread existing funds more thinly—fueling resentment among Whites who perceived they were now receiving less. This resentment helped ferment the myth of the zero-sum game and ushered in the era of small-government conservatism.

Research shows that many Whites believe the government favors minorities and that people of color receive the majority of public assistance. In response, White voters have repeatedly elected politicians promising to cut taxes and eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse”—code for reducing aid to minority communities. Yet in practice, these cuts have gutted programs that disproportionately benefit low- and middle-income Whites themselves: public schools, housing assistance, Medicaid, and infrastructure investments.

Here, white supremacy becomes self-defeating. Conditioned to see minorities as the enemy, many Whites fail to recognize that they, too, are the casualties of budget cuts and deregulation. Over the last 30 years, in the era of tax breaks for the wealthy and austerity for everyone else, the quality of life for working-class Whites has declined. Health outcomes have worsened; economic security has eroded. Yet these same voters continue to back policies that undercut their own material interests, trapped by a racial ideology that blinds them to shared struggle.

This racial double standard is glaring in our national discourse. When Black communities in the inner cities were devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s, the response was to blame “cultural pathology”—a supposed inherent dysfunction that government programs couldn’t fix. But when white Rust Belt towns later suffered the same fate, the focus shifted to economic solutions: job creation, skills training, and college affordability. Similarly, while the crack epidemic prompted a punitive “War on Drugs” that criminalized Black addicts, today’s opioid crisis—which disproportionately affects Whites—has been met with a compassionate, treatment-centered approach.

If White Americans had not been conditioned to see themselves as distinct from and superior to people of color, perhaps they would have recognized these earlier crises as national problems demanding collective solutions. Instead, institutional racism has fostered a cognitive dissonance: many Whites vote against their own economic interests, seeing social safety nets as handouts to undeserving minorities, even as they rely on these programs themselves.

Failing to see the interconnectedness of their fates, they lay the groundwork for their own communities to suffer—schools closing, roads crumbling, local economies collapsing, and families falling into despair. As long as Whites remain invested in or indifferent to the oppression of minorities, they perpetuate the very conditions that lead to their own decline.