…Is White and Male
So many people seem bewildered. Asking how we got here, as though the present arrived without warning. As though the alarms haven't been sounding for years, decades, centuries.
Communities living closest to the edge of white supremacy have continually been documenting the cost.
Why haven't we heard them?
Maybe we have and this topic is either too big or you feel helpless to do anything about it. Or maybe you're caught up in complacency.
It's important to know where you stand on this subject and if you're an enabler or an active advocate.
I'm writing this essay to bridge the gap, to help recognize the inherent harm, point out its damage and suggest that white people cannot afford to look away any more.
The intention of this essay is to confirm the trauma underlying the problems and how it's layered into the human collective. What follows touches just the surface of a systemic wound that runs through every institution, every generation, every body.
Before we look at the roads, we need to be honest about who built them — and whose job it is to dismantle them.
The White Male Supremacy Highway
Patriarchy is not just the operating system underneath the road. It is the self-prescribed highway itself. Hierarchy organized its own power, wrote the HIStory, named its terms, and decided whose life counted worthy of protecting.
Every force in this system of highways runs on that current.
Its set of values, relationships, and beliefs that give men authority and control over others with the Caucasian male as the default designation. Women, Blacks, gay, trans, immigrants, the disabled — are groups of people. But "white" has no such association. "White" means "American." Everything else is consequential.
Men and boys experience steady, lifelong pressure to fit their community's masculine norms while the rest of the population maintained white privilege across generations. Many were comfortable in this norm. Even compliant. They accepted the order they were born into, and over time stopped noticing there was a difference at all.
It's hard to say why apathy and complacency became the normative reaction to the malice of patriarchy. Are people unaware they are enablers?
Perhaps it was passed down like an inheritance — through assumption, through silence, through the enormous, inordinate relief of not having to look too closely at what your comfort costs someone else.
This is HIStory. It is the present, wearing the past's clothes.
People have been naming, screaming patriarchal damage for centuries. The ones with the loudest voices have been the ones that have been hurt — communities at the receiving end of the policies, erasure, oppression, discrimination. The injury. The enduring trauma.
The loudest documented it while it was happening. They protested, mourned, survived, and kept the record.
The record has always existed.
What we are living through now is a white reckoning landing hard. So before we ask how we got here, let's take an honest, harsh, direct look at the highways. What they're made of and the horrendous cost of driving these horrible roads.
The Big Picture.
Ethnic cleansing got us here.
The ground we stand on is genocidal. Before European colonialism, an estimated 5 to 15 million Indigenous people lived in North America. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 remained.
The government authorized more than 1,500 wars, attacks, and raids against Indigenous peoples. Languages, bloodlines, ceremonial traditions, and entire ways of knowing were systematically severed. Overt massacre was direct. And then there were the quieter violences of forced removal, starvation, land theft. But nothing is more shocking than the religious boarding school system for children as ethnocide — erasing culture and erasing kids.
Indigenous peoples owned 138 million acres in 1887, and lost 98.9% of their lands. The government attempted a reparations program after World War II — by the time it dissolved in 1978, it had paid out less than $1,000 per person, held in trust, never paid directly to anyone.
The nation has never held a truth commission. Never built a national memorial. Genocide lives in the present tense.
And the trauma still lives on. Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart's foundational research on historical trauma exposes the unresolved grief as massive group trauma continuing to impact Native American people and communities. HIStorical trauma is intergenerational.
The emotional and psychological wounding over lifetimes and across generations is cumulative. Science can prove that trauma transmits through DNA, altering gene expression in the body of every child born into its inheritance.
The ethnic cleansing that sits within Indigenous genetics is a continuing struggle. Native Americans are still being persecuted. They've been swept up in current day immigration enforcement, rounded up because of the color of their skin — because the system still does not see them as fully belonging to the land it took from them.
Racism got us here.
Chattel slavery was a business system that stripped identity and destroyed the lives of Africans. They were captured in their home country, shipped, sold, tortured, and raped as a commodity.
The worst kind of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual violence, repeated across generations.
Emancipation was followed by one hundred more years of institutionalized subjugation through Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, convict leasing, domestic terrorism, and lynching. Today the violations continue through modern forms — prison sentencing disparity and other systemic discrimination embedded in laws, institutions, and the societal attitudes that sustain them.
Throughout American HIStory, Black communities built centers of prosperity — only to have them devastated by white violence, organized destruction, and government complicity.
From Reconstruction through the twentieth century, white mobs targeted thriving Black towns and business districts, killing residents, burning what had been built, setting back economic progress for generations.
The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Wilmington, North Carolina.
Rosewood, Florida.
Atlanta, Georgia.
Durham's Hayti.
Chicago's Bronzeville.
Washington D.C.'s U Street — Black Broadway.
These communities were proof that prosperity existed as a threat to white institutions. They built. And white America destroyed it — with fire, with bullets, with legislation, with highways routed directly through success.
Research documents the living inheritance of these losses and names it Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome — a consequence of multigenerational oppression, manifesting in communities as diminished self-worth, persistent anger, and the deep residue of internalized racism.
Racism and discrimination are still operating in a world that doesn't own what it did. The current administration's rollback of civil rights protections, voting access, and DEI programs is one face of it. Immigration enforcement is another. ICE agents are blatantly, actively racially profiling — stopping people based on skin color, language, and appearance.
This is an open road of racism wearing a federal badge.
Misogyny got us here.
The word itself traces to Ancient Greek — mīsoguníā. Contempt and disdain for women. In the third century, Tertullian, one of the founders of Latin Christianity, addressed women directly: You are the gateway of the devil. That sentence became a part of religious doctrine. It became a part of institutions that shaped governments, families, medicine, and culture for the next eighteen hundred years.
Misogyny is more than a demonic word. It has been a deadly and destructive injury to all humans for the last 8000 to 10,000 years as a nearly universal phenomenon.
Over 80% of women and 40% of men have been sexually harassed or assaulted in the country. As recently as fifty years ago, marital rape was legal in all fifty states. In 1970, women made up 43 percent of the U.S. labor force and still needed a male co-signer to open a bank account.
The woman's movement of the 1960's and 1970's started to change the gross inequities. The harm and damage was being challenged and laws began to change. Roe v. Wade was passed giving women reproductive choice.
Perpetrators were finally being held accountable until a violent backlash of huge proportions ensued. Legal battles followed and recently Roe v. Wade was overturned with some states making extreme restrictions.
Child abuse victims of Jeffrey Epstein stepped forward, were ignored, then believed. Justice really never prevailed for them in a political misogynistic judicial system. Eventually an elite network documented the names and public faces of a private system of sexual predators that have operated for decades with seeming impunity.
Virtually every woman who runs this gauntlet of patriarchy learned to make herself smaller, quieter, absorbing contempt as an identity — or faced the harsh brutality of questioning the system.
In this way, misogyny is a universally shared, deeply embedded, extremely invisible trauma. It is a huge creator of intolerable suffering. Humans are not designed for the hatred of mother, mothering, and acts of violence against the maternal.
Homophobia got us here.
Patriarchy sees heterosexuality as the only legitimate structure of traditional family, marriage and desire. It's erased male love from existence.
Defined as religious deviance from the social order, enormous resources were poured across centuries into surveilling, punishing, shaming, discriminating, abolishing, and legislating homosexual love and intimacy.
Homophobia, lesbiphobia, transphobia and biphobia have all created traumatic oppression. The cultural labeling, attacks and policing as dangerous, deviant, and expendable creates enormous suffering:
PTSD rates among the LGBTQ population reach as high as 48 percent.
Thousands of hate crimes are reported every year.
LGBTQ people are nine times more likely to experience violent hate crimes than others.
The outbreak of AIDS stigmatized the community.
The HIStory of homosexual rights involves a long struggle for equality and acceptance. Gay rights and anti-hate laws made extensive progress and marriage became a states rights issue until 2015 when the Supreme Court finally ruled it legal across the nation.
Across its two terms, the Trump administration has spewed hate rhetoric at all marginalized people but it's especially focused on transgender identity.
Erase protections for LGBTQ communities
Deny healthcare & educational access.
Extreme policies like Kansas canceling transgender driver's licenses.
Bigotry got us here.
The casual kind — in the joke, the assumption, the hiring decision, the look. And the institutional kind written into law, policy, and the invisible architecture of everyday systems, compound pain across generations. Bigotry does its deepest work through the steady narrowing of the value of human life putting conditions on worth.
In the 1970's, the popular tv show All in the Family featured a bigot as its main character. Archie Bunker became a cultural landmark — given a living room, a laugh track, and thirty million weekly viewers. The question scholars have never fully resolved: did the show hold bigotry up for critique, or did it give it a comfortable seat and a platform? That question remains open. The fact that it remains open is itself the answer to the bigger issue.
Ableism got us here.
The insistence that a fit image of healthy minds and bodies are productive — resulted in centuries of exclusion, institutionalization, and erasure visited upon those who fell outside that narrow measure.
One in four Americans lives with a disability. They face elevated mental health concerns, are more likely to need mental health services, and face the most systemic barriers to receiving them. Research shows ableism embedded in the mental health care system itself, carried even by the providers tasked with care.
Ableism and white supremacy are structurally intertwined in a hierarchy of bodies. Both define worth on terms that concentrate value at the top and discard what cannot be used. The trauma of repeatedly being defined and dismissed as a burden — across a lifetime — is what the system produces.
People with disabilities experience poverty at nearly two and a half times the rate of people without disabilities. That gap is widening.
Inhumanity got us here.
It's hard not to assume that cruelty is the point. The basic dismissal — in faith, in language, in origin, in body, in desire. The bureaucracy is infuriating because it wears a neutral face while processing paperwork that ends lives. It uses the language of procedure to carry out the injustices — it lets everyone involved feel like they are simply doing their job.
Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil. It does not require hatred. It requires compliance. And compliance is always the easy way out of responsibility and accountability.
"Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil." — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
The demonization got us here.
The oldest move available to concentrated power: manufacture a threat from below. Make the hungry on food stamps into the enemy. Make the displaced immigrant into the invasion. Make the exhausted mother and the grieving child into a problem, and pour into that manufactured problem all the resources that might otherwise go toward justice. Keep everyone looking backwards or sideways. The move works because it always has — and because looking away feels safer than looking at the power imbalance of patriarchy.
Caring more about profits got us here.
Making money is the economic spine of the whole structure — the value system that made everything we named above, self-perpetuating. The statistics are sobering: In 2024, the nation's billionaire class grew wealthier by $1.4 trillion.
The top 1 percent of U.S. households hold 30.5 percent of the country's wealth. The bottom 50 percent hold 2.5 percent. The number of people living in poverty has not improved much since 1990 and minimum wage has sat at $7.25 an hour for the last seventeen years.
When profit becomes the orienting principle of a civilization, everything else becomes a cost to be managed. People become units. Land becomes inventory. The future becomes a liability on the balance sheet of the present. White supremacy and patriarchy are foundational to this system. Sustained, funded, and protected because the hierarchy required them.
The Pandemic Revelation
Lockdown did not create crisis. It stripped the insulation from its casing.
When the distractions were removed — the commute, the schedule, the social commitments, the noise — what remained was what busy schedules covered up.
The pandemic intensified existing patriarchal structures, leading to what some describe as "disaster patriarchy" — a crisis-driven reassertion of male dominance and control that eroded marginalized rights and autonomy.
Patriarchal structure revealed itself not just in who died, and who didn't. In who lost income and who gained it. In who absorbed the care labor — childcare, elder care, sick care — without relief. In who was deemed essential and treated as disposable. In who was protected and who was abandoned. When the busyness of business as usual subsided, the unhealed trauma we pointed to above revealed itself.
The collective nervous system, carrying centuries of unprocessed harm, surfaced when the buffer was removed. A system built on suppression exists in the minds, emotions, hearts, cells and organs of the suffering.
Political Exposure
That exposure is still sparking suffering. Right now.
The political outrage machine — chaos engineered for profit, division weaponized as governance — is the currency of culture. Algorithms built to surface the most inflammatory content. Outrage feeding engagement. Engagement feeding revenue. A cycle that destabilizes public thinking, manufactures exhaustion, and makes apathy feel like the only rational response.
The masses are kept distracted by triggered emotions — at each other, at the next manufactured crisis, at the culture war of the week — while the consolidation of power continues unimpeded. Mental exhaustion is a feature of this dominant system. It is doing exactly what the white male engineers designed it to do.
The system is operating without its disguise. The cruelty has purpose. The hierarchy is defined. The contempt for human life is on record. We are being shown, plainly and in real time, the excruciating damage of patriarchy.
These are not separate wounds. They share a root.
That visibility is the opening. A major paradigm shift needs to occur for us to stop the highways of harm. What we do with it is the next question.
The Road to Change
The road of patriarchy is paved by human conditioning. Stone by stone, generation by generation, through deliberate violence and enabled by the silent permission of those who looked away.
What was built through human apathy and human complicity can also be dismantled through human effort, attention, transparency, accountability, awareness and deep transformation. But it isn't an easy or fast path.
It’s methodical and deliberate.
One way to start is in noticing.
What we say, how we say it, matters.
Name the wound. Point to its cause. Say the actual words. White supremacy. Patriarchy. Ethnic cleansing. Misogyny. Bigotry. Inhumanity.
The refusal to name them is itself a form of denial — keeping it complacent, keeping it invisible. Naming is the first act of regeneration.
Learn to see the signs in the ordinary and extraordinary moments — in who is heard in a meeting, who is stopped on a street, who gets the loan, who gets the sentence, who gets the raise. Who gets erased. White privilege becomes visible under scrutiny. Speaking truth to yourself, and truth to power is how it loosens its hold.
See your own privilege, position, role, and silence. White people need to wake up and question their own complicity. Oppression is not the problem of the oppressed.
Our humanity is at stake. Speaking up for others is how we regain our own.
Do not look away when it gets uncomfortable or it seems impossibly big. Unite in humble relationship to communities needing help. Sit back. Listen with humility. Witness their pain and validate it.
Every. Single. Time.
Teach this humanity to kids.
It is remarkable how children don't initially care about race, color, religion or nationality when they are young. But at some point, they see differently just like we did.
The generational cycle of racism is not always because they were taught to be that way. It is because we are that way.
Children are not just the future. They are the sum total of their past influences. They learn everything by observing and absorbing the world around them. Every single prejudice and fear we have was also acquired from someone else, from somewhere else.
Move from apathy into practice. Feminist activist, adrienne maree brown writes that we must practice at the scale of our lives what we want to see at the scale of the world. Local. Consistent. Unglamorous.
"In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose." — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
The people who call out for resolution and change, carry knowledge and resilience. They represent possibility because they persisted regardless of the mechanisms designed to stop them. They are not waiting for the comfortable to catch up. They are building the momentum while everyone catches on. Thank them.
Then stop. Listen. And learn from the ones who paved the way.
The Transformation Road
What white supremacy has conditioned lives in dissonance — in inherited wounds, in DNA, in cells, organs, in beliefs we absorbed as normal. It is in the protective denial that triggers the nervous system, tenses the shoulders, upsets the stomach. It lives within the systemic institutions that perpetuate and amplify suffering.
The outer dissonance and the inner dissonance do not just mirror each other. They simultaneously overlap as vibrational waves.
Wounds that exist on a personal scale also interface the collective on a quantum level. Known as the morphic field of resonance, this field is filled with human consciousness and can be accessed with intention by those with ancient knowledge and skill.
I’m a seasoned and trained conduit for collective trauma processing — personal alchemy thats the Earthwork needed for these times. Dismantling unconscious patriarchal patterns as a collective purpose, and restoring the balance of matriarchal authority, are the primary focus of my online services.
Resolving it at the personal and ancestral level is how the road moves on from paternal patterns. This is paradigm-shifting work at consciousness levels. It is not immediate — it is a long-term goal. Immediacy is attached to male ideas of competition and comparison.
The road was built by human conditioning. It can be deconstructed and rebuilt by human regeneration.
To be restorative, responsibility for change needs to move from the oppressed, to the perpetrators.
There's nothing more important.
This essay was inspired in part ñoby a post by @thereclaimed.
About the Author
Bette Hanson is the founder of Multi Dimensional Healing, a consciousness-level practice of quantum alchemy. The patriarchal trauma documented in this essay lives as karmic conditioning in the body, ancestral wounds, and the collective interface. She has 20 years continuous training in an awakening lineage focused on transformation. Her current offerings dismantle the unconscious patriarchal patterns that travel through generations and past lives, restoring feminine authority. Schedule a personal session or join one of the online groups. Learn more at BetteHanson.com.
References
References
Ethnic Cleansing / Intergenerational Trauma
¹ Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart, PhD — Historical Trauma Resource Guide, Tribal Information Exchange / Child Welfare Capacity Building Center for Tribes. tribalinformationexchange.org
² International Journal for Equity in Health (2023) — "Association between gene methylation and experiences of historical trauma in Alaska Native peoples." PMC10485934
³ Indian Country Today / USC Center for Health Journalism — "Trauma May Be Woven Into DNA of Native Americans." ictnews.org
⁴ Genos Center Foundation — "Native American Genocide: A Dark Legacy of Colonialism for Indigenous People." genoscenter.org
⁵ Erin Duddy — "Reparations for Indigenous Tribes: What the United States Can Learn From New Zealand." Fordham International Law Journal Vol. XLVIII. fordhamilj.org
⁶ Science (2024) — "Native Tribes Have Lost 99% of Their Land in the United States." science.org
⁷ Fabrizio Musacchio (2025) — "The Ethnocide of Native American Children in Canada by Catholic Residential Schools." fabriziomusacchio.com
⁸ TIME (2026) — "A State of Panic: Native Americans Left in the Dark Weeks After ICE Arrests." time.com/7379166
⁹ MPR News (Feb. 23, 2026) — "How Native Communities Pushed Back as ICE Operations Escalated." mprnews.org
¹⁰ The Independent — “ICE Native Americans Arrested Minnesota Citizens." independent.co.uk
Racism / Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome
¹¹ Dr. Joy DeGruy — Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005, revised 2017). joydegruy.com
¹² Scott-Jones & Kamara — "The Traumatic Impact of Structural Racism on African Americans." Delaware Journal of Public Health (2020). PMC8352535
¹³ Anthony Washington M.Ed. — "Beyond Tulsa: The Black Wall Streets America Tried to Erase." Thoughts Processed (Feb. 2025). thoughtsprocessed.org
¹⁴ Julian Johnson Law — "The System That Destroyed Black Wealth: How Jim Crow Erased Generations of Black Landowners." julianjohnsonlo aw.com
Misogyny
¹⁵ Tertullian — De Cultu Feminarum (On the Apparel of Women), Book I:1–2, c. 198–203 AD. Trans. C.W. Marx.
¹⁶ Abi Rached, M., Hankir, A., & Zaman, R. (2021) — "Patriarchal Upbringing in the 21st Century." Psychiatria Danubina, 33(Suppl 11), 121-132. PMC10544243
¹⁷ Kaur, R. & Garg, S. — "Misogyny, Feminism, and Sexual Harassment." Industrial Psychiatry Journal, 27(2), 111–113 (2018).
¹⁸ Holland, J. — Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006.
¹⁹ RAINN — Statistics: Victims of Sexual Violence.
²⁰ Population Reference Bureau — "Closing the Male-Female Labor Force Gap." (March 2007)
Homophobia
²¹ PTSD.va.gov — PTSD rates in LGBTQ population
²² FBI Uniform Crime Report (2024) — anti-LGBTQ hate crime data
²³ PMC8037392
²⁴ ACLU Kansas — transgender driver's license invalidation. aclukansas.org
Bigotry
²⁵ APA (1974) — citation ref. 1974-27627-001 (All in the Family research)
Ableism
²⁶ Yale School of Public Heal pm th / Dr. Katie Wang — "Ableism in Mental Healthcare Settings." SSM – Qualitative Research in Health (2024).
²⁷ PMC12343582 — "Are we truly fighting ableism?" Frontiers in Sociology (2025)
²⁸ Truthout — "Ableism and White Supremacy Are Intertwined." truthout.org
Inhumanity
²⁹ Hannah Arendt — Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press, 1963.
Profits
³⁰ Oxfam International — billionaire wealth growth data (2024/2025 reports)
³¹ USA.gov — Federal Minimum Wage.
Pandemic Revelation
³² Monash University Lens — "Progress Interrupted: The Rise of the Patriarchy During the Pandemic."
Political Exposure
³³ B. Hanson — "The Chaos Culture: Tech Giants Profit from Political Instability & Your Outrage, Pt1." Cosmic Transformer (Substack).
Road to Change
³⁴ The Root — "5 Ways White People Can Fight White Supremacy."
³⁵ adrienne maree brown — Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2017.
Transformation Road
³⁶ B. Hanson — "What You Need to Know to Break Free of Ancient Patterns: An Introduction to Shifting Consciousness." Cosmic Transformer (Substack).