Me and White Supremacy

What does it mean to look at yourself and see the ways you are complicit in systems of injustice? In Me and White Supremacy, Layla F. Saad argues that true antiracism starts not with slogans or social media posts but with rigorous, uncomfortable self-examination. The book began as a viral Instagram challenge and has since evolved into a structured twenty-eight-day journey that guides readers—especially white and white-passing individuals—through recognizing, unpacking, and taking responsibility for their role in sustaining white supremacy.

Saad’s central claim is that white supremacy is not limited to fringe extremists—it’s the air that those with white privilege breathe, a system that both benefits them and blinds them to its profound harms. Her goal is not to induce guilt but to inspire accountability. Guilt, she writes, can easily become another form of paralysis or privilege; responsibility is where change begins. The book’s structure combines education, reflection, and activation so that you not only understand racism intellectually but also take emotional and behavioral ownership of your transformation.

The Origins and Purpose of the Work

Developed initially as a free online workbook, Saad’s project emerged during a period of social upheaval when many white readers were asking, “What can I do?” Echoing Robin DiAngelo’s argument in White Fragility (who also wrote the book’s foreword), Saad insists that this question is often disingenuous—a way to appear engaged without facing discomfort. Her 28-day structure ensures participants can’t intellectually "skip ahead" to solutions without first confronting the daily habits that maintain racial inequality.

Through prompts and guided journaling, Saad draws out the subconscious defenses that protect the white ego: silence, fragility, tone policing, and the desire to be perceived as “one of the good ones.” She asks her readers to examine not only external racism but the internalized beliefs that shape everyday interactions and values. The work aims to help white readers stop denying their participation in white supremacy and begin dismantling it from within.

What It Means to “Do the Work”

Saad emphasizes that antiracism is not a performance or intellectual hobby; it’s a lifelong practice of truth-telling, love, and commitment. She outlines three essential ingredients: truth (radical honesty about one’s complicity), love (a deep commitment to collective human flourishing beyond self-image), and commitment (a willingness to persist through discomfort). This isn’t a book meant to make you feel better—it’s meant to make you better equipped to stop inflicting racial harm.

Readers are instructed to treat the work like spiritual discipline or recovery: consistent, rooted in community when possible, and guided by humility. The end goal is to become, as Saad puts it, a good ancestor—someone who uses their privilege to create a world where future generations live with dignity and justice.

Why This Work Matters Now

Saad situates her book within a global resurgence of racist and nationalist ideologies, noting that what appears as a “return” of hate is really a revelation of what was always there. For readers living in predominantly white societies, the book offers both a moral mirror and a practical manual for introspection. While the modern news cycle often shifts quickly, this work asks for sustained introspection and moral stamina.

“If you are a person who believes in love, justice, integrity, and equity for all, then you know this work is nonnegotiable.” – Layla F. Saad

By connecting the personal to the systemic, Saad reminds readers that racism doesn’t only live in laws or extremists but also in silence, comfort, and avoidance. Only by transforming self-awareness into daily practice—into speaking up at the dinner table, investing in BIPOC leadership, and confronting one’s internalized biases—can genuine equality be built. The book ultimately reframes antiracism as not just civic duty, but moral and spiritual liberation—for everyone involved.

Saad begins her curriculum with the foundational concept of white privilege, borrowing from Peggy McIntosh’s metaphor of the “invisible knapsack”—a collection of unearned advantages that people with white skin carry without realizing it. From favorable treatment by teachers to an unquestioned sense of belonging in professional spaces, these privileges shape daily life in ways that seem invisible precisely because they are normalized.

Unearned Advantage and Daily Assumptions

Saad asks readers to recount everyday moments—shopping, applying for jobs, interacting with police—where whiteness affords comfort and safety that others cannot assume. White privilege is not the absence of struggle but the absence of racialized struggle. This distinction pushes readers to examine how class, gender, and sexuality may intersect but never cancel out racial advantage.

She recalls her own mother teaching her that, as a Black Muslim girl in Britain, she would have to work three times as hard to receive equal acknowledgement. That simple conversation, Saad says, revealed how early and unavoidably racial hierarchy imprints itself onto children’s self-concept.

Discomfort as a Diagnostic Tool

Many white readers instinctively resist discussions of privilege because it feels personal or accusatory. Saad reframes this resistance as a signal of where reflection is most needed. Discomfort is not proof of wrongness; it’s proof of work. When white people deny privilege, they also deny the system that upholds their sense of safety and possibility. In her words, refusing to acknowledge privilege is itself one of its perks.

From Awareness to Responsibility

The purpose of acknowledging privilege is not to wallow in guilt but to realign how you use it. Saad reminds readers that privilege can be transformed into a lever for equity—by naming injustice where silence once stood, by redistributing resources, or by refusing to center one’s own comfort. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ijeoma Oluo, she argues that privilege awareness without redistribution is hollow. True allyship requires action rooted in humility and accountability.

The second major concept Saad explores is white fragility—a term coined by Robin DiAngelo to describe how even minimal racial stress causes defensive reactions among white people. Saad illustrates this through her own experiences of being attacked, dismissed, or tone-policed after publishing essays about race. These reactions, she explains, are not anomalies but engineered responses created by a culture that equates whiteness with innocence.

Emotional Evasion and Self-Protection

White fragility surfaces as tears, anger, guilt, or silence—all tactics that shift attention back to the white person’s feelings rather than the harm being discussed. In corporate settings, this might look like a white colleague changing the topic after racist behavior is described. In personal relationships, it appears as “I didn’t mean it that way” or “You’re making everything about race.” Each reaction recenters whiteness as the subject needing care.

The “Good Person” Trap

Fragility thrives on the belief that racism equals moral failing, so good people can’t be racist. Saad dismantles this binary by asserting that racism is systemic, not a matter of intent. To be white in a white-dominant society means internalizing its narratives of superiority, whether you consciously agree with them or not. Accepting that truth, she writes, is not an indictment but the first step toward integrity.

Building Racial Stamina

The antidote to fragility is resilience: learning to stay in the discomfort. Readers are urged to practice enduring racial tension without dissolving into avoidance or justification. Racial growth, Saad echoes DiAngelo, requires what she calls “building racial stamina”—the ability to have difficult conversations, hear critique, and change behavior rather than retreat. Only when fragility is replaced by persistence can allyship deepen into sustained solidarity.

Throughout the early chapters, Saad disentangles the everyday behaviors that quietly uphold white supremacy. She focuses on recurring patterns—white silence, tone policing, superiority, and exceptionalism—that transform passive attitudes into systemic damage. Each represents a different face of white complicity.

White Silence and Tone Policing

White silence, Saad explains, is not neutrality but endorsement. Martin Luther King Jr.’s lament that the silence of the good hurts more than the actions of the bad echoes throughout her pages. Likewise, tone policing—criticizing Black voices for being too angry or “not nice enough”—functions as emotional censorship. Both protect white comfort at the expense of Black truth. Her example of Serena Williams being judged more harshly than her white male peers on the tennis court drives this lesson vividly home.

Superiority and Exceptionalism

Saad insists that superiority is the root of white supremacy—the deeply embedded belief that whiteness defines intelligence, beauty, and civility. Even well-meaning liberals harbor “white exceptionalism”—the conviction that they’re immune to bias because they vote progressively or have BIPOC friends. Quoting Dr. King’s warning about the “white moderate” who prefers order over justice, Saad challenges this self-satisfied complacency. As long as you see racism as something others do, she warns, you will remain complicit.

Her exercises guide readers to recall times when they stayed silent at family gatherings, when they demanded to be reassured that they were “one of the good ones,” or when they assumed their view was more rational than that of a BIPOC colleague. These aren’t anomalies—they are the gears that keep the system turning.

In Week 2, Saad pivots from internal awareness to externalized harm, examining how systemic anti-Blackness manifests against Black women, men, and children. Drawing on scholars such as Brittney Cooper, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Moya Bailey, she explores how historic stereotypes—the Angry Black Woman, the Violent Black Man, and the Adultified Black Child—continue to shape modern life.

Black Women, Misogynoir, and Stereotypes

Saad highlights how figures like Viola Davis have exposed the narrow roles Black women are permitted to occupy in Hollywood and beyond. The term misogynoir, coined by Moya Bailey, captures how racism and sexism intersect to target Black women as simultaneously superhuman and subhuman—admired for strength but denied softness or vulnerability. From hair policing to maternal health disparities, these intersections have life-or-death consequences.

Black Men and the Fear-Fetish Cycle

For Black men, centuries-old myths of danger and hypersexuality persist, producing both fear and fetishization. Saad invokes cultural archetypes—from the propaganda of Birth of a Nation to modern police profiling—to show how white imagination criminalizes Black masculinity. These stereotypes, she notes, explain why people can claim to value equality yet cross the street when a Black man passes by.

Black Children and the Loss of Innocence

Saad connects the adultification of Black children—treating them as older, less innocent, and more culpable—to tragic realities. Research confirms that educators and police see Black boys as older and guiltier than white peers, while Black girls are seen as needing less protection or care. This underlines how prejudice operates before adulthood, shaping educational experiences, punishments, and opportunities.

By confronting anti-Blackness directly, Saad calls on readers to abandon the myth that racism is about kindness or civility. It’s about who gets to be seen as fully human. Recognizing humanity in Black people, she argues, means dismantling every reflex that implies otherwise.

Weeks 3 and 4 expose the dangers of performative activism and map a path toward accountable allyship. Saad examines patterns like white saviorism, tokenism, optical allyship, and white feminism—all of which masquerade as progress while reasserting white dominance.

The Pitfalls of Optical Allyship

Optical allyship occurs when white individuals or institutions perform antiracism for image management—posting hashtags, hiring a token BIPOC speaker, or citing diversity in press releases while guarding power and comfort. Saad recounts being invited to conferences that wanted her “diverse voice” but offered no safeguards against racial hostility. These gestures, she explains, use Black presence to validate white virtue without systemic change.

White Saviorism and Tokenism

White saviorism, as Ijeoma Oluo also critiques, positions BIPOC as helpless subjects waiting for benevolent intervention. Whether through voluntourism, “rescuing” inner-city students, or controlling the narrative in social justice spaces, the white savior reinforces their superiority. Relatedly, tokenism uses a handful of BIPOC individuals as symbols of inclusivity, creating a façade of equality without redistribution of opportunity or voice. Both are acts of dehumanization disguised as benevolence.

Transforming Intent into Practice

Saad urges readers to measure allyship not by identity but by consistency: Are you willing to risk comfort, prestige, and relationships for justice? She draws on definitions from PeerNetBC and activist Amélie Lamont, emphasizing that allyship is not an identity; it is a practice. A person becomes trustworthy only through sustained, accountable action recognized by BIPOC themselves.

This section culminates in reflection on white feminism—the historical tendency to fight patriarchy while upholding racial hierarchy. By tracing the suffragist movement’s exclusion of Black women, Saad reminds readers that feminism without antiracism is simply another form of supremacy. Intersectional awareness, inspired by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, is essential if solidarity is to be authentic rather than ornamental.

The final chapters move from personal reckoning to communal responsibility. Saad introduces the concept of becoming a “good ancestor”—a moral compass guiding readers beyond self-concern toward generational justice. The goal is not perfection but persistence: doing the work daily so future generations need not repair the same harms.

Values, Responsibility, and Loss of Privilege

Saad asks readers to reexamine their values: do they truly align with justice, or are they built on maintaining safety and comfort? Practicing antiracism means surrendering advantages—social ease, assumed belonging, and sometimes family harmony. Privilege must be risked, not leveraged, for equity to materialize. Her journaling prompts—such as listing what comforts you are willing to lose—convert reflection into action plans.

Commitment as Daily Practice

Day 28’s exercises anchor the book’s philosophy: commitments over promises, practice over perfection. Readers craft tangible pledges—specific, uncomfortable actions like initiating conversations, donating to BIPOC-led organizations, or organizing workplace reforms. Saad cautions that no one will reward you for this work. Integrity, not applause, becomes the measure of success.

Carrying the Work Forward

Saad closes with an invitation to community: join book circles, follow BIPOC leadership, and convert inner change into structural advocacy. Quoting Octavia Butler’s Earthseed, she reminds readers: “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.” The call is clear: antiracism is not an event but a lifelong vocation. To do what is right, she concludes, you must be willing to do what is hard.