Protesters at Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson, August 14, 2014. (Lindy Drew) Racism is an evil, a willful lie, and simply immoral. Eva wrote this to me in an email the day after our second conversation.1 Eva is one of many white mothers who volunteered to speak with me about their growing understanding and experience of their whiteness. I met her through a program aimed at raising racial awareness among white people; I was following a few such programs as part of an ongoing ethnographic project on the diversity industry in the St. Louis region. She woke up that morning, she told me, thinking about the immorality of racism. Her email continued, “I think, as a white person, when you realize that the history, the laws, the education, the religion, the teaching from your elders, etc., all stem from the doctrine that whites are superior and all the ‘others’ may not even be fully human, then ‘immoral’ becomes the only grounding word … feeling … interpretation.” I wanted clarification. I wrote back: “If racism is immoral, evil, and if whiteness is complicit with racism, whiteness is immoral. How then can a white person ever lead a good life, a moral life?” Her response was prompt. And clear. “I do not think American white people can live a moral life.” She reminded me again of her white hands. In our conversations, Eva had more than a few times lifted her hands, as if they bore evidence of her guilt, as if to say, “See!” She was marking something more than white complicity with the harms of racism. She suggested that given the history and structures of racial inequality in America, white people are necessarily—inevitably—immoral. For them, redemption or ethical action was foreclosed. Eva was typical of the mostly white women who volunteered to participate in my project: middle class, minimally college educated, politically liberal, and suburban. Most were mothers and a few were grandmothers. Nearly all began to participate in whiteness and antibias programs after Michael Brown's killing in 2014. Since then, they had come to experience their whiteness as an intolerable—indeed irresolvable—moral problem. Eva and other women I spoke to worried about their capacity to do “good.” They wanted to be recognized by others, especially people of color, as “good,” but feared they would misspeak, act awkwardly or inauthentically, and expose their racist nature. They said they could not clearly see their white selves and were suspicious of their own intentions. They were stricken by moral anxiety. I am sometimes tempted to cynically interpret white people's troubled confessions of moral anxiety. Why do they need to announce this, and announce it so often? Why do they need to say this to me, a Korean American anthropologist speaking to them as part of a research project? What do these confessions accomplish for them? But as an anthropologist, I focus my analysis on the conditions of possibility for this particular construction and experience of the liberal, race-conscious, anxious white self. Their moral and racial anxieties reflect, in part, a popular fascination with whiteness, as shown by many prominent conversations about it in popular and social media. Whiteness has come to represent the insecurity, tensions, and suspicions animating politics in the post-Obama era of the Trump presidency, be it whiteness in the guise of Trump voters, the white working class, suburban white soccer moms, opioid addicts, gun enthusiasts, or Trump himself. I argue, moreover, that Eva and the other women made sense of their white selves and grappled with moral anxiety amid a crisis of whiteness in post–civil rights America (Winant 2004, 4–5). Crisis here does not mean dismantled white supremacy. Far from it. Rather, the meanings and values attached to whiteness have become less certain and fragmented because of the partial successes of Black and postcolonial movements in the 1960s and 1970s, along with the breakdown of the racialized postwar social compact, which subsidized the formation of the white middle class and its financial security. To this conjuncture, I would add three additional elements: (1) the widespread acceptance of color-blind, postracial ideology, (2) the purchase of therapeutic discourses and techniques in everyday thinking and feeling about family and relationships, and (3) the pedagogy of diversity and inclusion that is meant to ameliorate racism. The women I talked with were deeply sincere in their desire to learn and improve. Some described “their work” (on themselves and as participants in racial-awareness programs) as a calling, as having given meaning to their lives. They called it, again and again, their “work.” I nonetheless notice an irony in what they did: their racial sincerity, their vigilance about the “work,” is fed and fueled by their suspicion of other white people and of themselves. In this social-historical conjuncture, white moral experience—being a good white person—is felt as paradox. Protesters at Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson, August 14, 2014. (Lindy Drew) In the St. Louis region, Michael Brown's killing and the widespread protests stirred more confusion and incited many, in particular liberal white women, to seek out what it all meant. There's been a dramatic proliferation of what I tentatively call white self-education spaces—one part of a larger market constituted by corporate, nonprofit, for-profit, academic, and individual freelance agents driving the desire for and motivating the purchase of diversity education and consultation. The latter takes the form of antibias, antiracist (ABAR) programs as well as lectures, community talks, informal gatherings, and book clubs. I've been involved in what is termed “diversity and inclusion” work in the St. Louis region, lecturing, consulting, and leading workshops for nonprofit organizations. I've observed (and participated in) the circulation of facilitators, books, documentaries, and other educational materials within and across those spaces. I have been able to trace how these practices together constitute an emerging shared ethos and language of whiteness and the white self. When I entered these spaces, participants greeted me with earnestness and, often, eagerness to talk about their whiteness. (I was not allowed in all-white caucus groups, however.) My visible racial identity as Asian in a Black and white city may have situated me as “neutral” or nonpartisan, or perhaps my status as a college professor marked me as a model minority. But it is also true that talking about whiteness was, for these people, an urgent need. My presence created an opportunity. For instance, one person I met organized an informal gathering for me, a casual dinner, relaying to me how excited and “grateful” her friends were to be invited. Over time I came to understand that they understood these as opportunities, in their words, to “learn more about themselves,” “work on themselves,” “grow,” and “improve.” They looked forward to “being held accountable,” “pushed,” and “challenged,” so that they could, in the oft-repeated paradoxical phrase, “learn to be comfortable with discomfort.” Their concern with their own morality and self-improvement was loud and persistent. Nearly all my interlocutors began their story of racial awakening with the protests. But, to be clear, as some actually admitted, it was not Brown's death that stoked personal moral outrage. Most knew police had killed Black men and women, but their deaths, including Brown's, did not grip them, staying peripheral to their personal and intimate lives. But when protests occurred near them, week after week, intruding into their normal lives, their sense of the implicit goodness of their lives was finally troubled. As many women explained to me, they could no longer ignore that something was wrong. Listening to their descriptions of this turning point, I saw that their participation in circuits of white education, and their self-talk, were actions of moral striving. The protests incited for them a moment of “moral breakdown” (Zigon 2007).2 Morality can be understood as an ideological, popular discourse and as a habitus of “unreflective, nonintentional dispositions” (Zigon 2007, 135). Drawing on Heidegger, Zigon persuasively argues that morality should be considered a practice of “dwelling” in familiarity, in which one is among and involved with familiar others in relations of mutual concern (Zigon 2007). Dwelling is “being-in-the-world in such a way that as part of that world one is intimately intertwined with and concerned for it and its constituent parts” (Zigon 2014, 757). The breakdown is not a judgement of whether a thing, person, or event is bad; rather, it is the disruption of familiar everyday expectations and dispositions, such that one's normal mode of living feels unsettled. It is an intrusion in “one's normal, everyday mode of being-in-the-world” (Zigon 2007, 137), wherein the “intrusion” becomes an object or dilemma to be resolved. “The ethical subject,” Zigon (2007, 138) says, “no longer dwells in the comfort of the familiar, unreflective being-in-the-world, but rather stands uncomfortably and uncannily in the situation-at-hand.” That describes what I am hearing, I thought when I read those words. Ethics, in this conceptualization, is the practice of addressing the breakdown. It is in moments of breakdown that people work on themselves and in so doing change their way of being in the world (138). Repeatedly, my interlocutors pointed out that they didn't trust other white people's stated motivations. Neither did they trust themselves. They learned to see their white selves as opaque. Their white selves were constituted in part by the “agency panic” (Melley 2000, 12), uncertainty about one's autonomy and self-control, circulating in our current climate of suspicion and paranoia. These white folks—especially women—were striving to reclaim a sense of moral agency through deliberate actions in a social-historical conjuncture that nonetheless undermines their very confidence in their capacity to be and do good. The paradox is lived with confusion and frustration. And not a few tears. And then more commitment to the work. That's how it feels to them. That's how they narrate their moral striving to be “good” white women, good white mothers. The moral paradox I describe is clearly the outcome of gendered and classed realities. Most of my research participants are middle- and upper-middle-class women and mothers (and grandmothers). Many live in racially homogenous suburban neighborhoods. There is more to be said about the implications of these facts than I can delve into here.3 But a few things are clear. For these women, “mother” is a powerful, polyvalent organizing identity, expressed in a strong child-centered ideology of motherhood. Feminist scholars have described this orientation as “intensive motherhood” (Hays 1996) and “concerted cultivation” (Lareau 2003). This brand of mothering demands dedication and self-sacrifice to developing children's talents and investments (financial, emotional, psychological). In other words, mothers invest in building their children's cultural capital. It is a kind of parenting formed in the recent contemporary context of middle-class economic and social-cultural insecurity, activating a “longing to secure” (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012, 20). Children embody not only the last vestige of innocence and intimacy in an increasingly frightening world, but they are also “accumulation strategies,” investments in securing a “good” future (Katz 2008, 9). The women I spoke with saw themselves as responsible for educating and preparing children for an uncertain future. They explicitly worried about how their children would develop as socially responsible, good people. One single mother, for example, recounted the shock and disappointment when her toddler son expressed fear of Black men. She said she had to know more about herself to become a better mother. The progressive liberal women in my study are heavily involved in children's schools, extracurricular activities and opportunities, church, and charitable organizations. They are all committed to providing what their children “deserve” in order to be successful. This, importantly, includes exposure to diversity. To raise good children, in their view, is to teach them about race and privilege (Hagerman 2018). “The race talk” is now a parental obligation, at least for this group of women living in the wake of the Ferguson protests. Herein, however, lies another dimension of their moral dilemma. They question whether their parenting truly addresses social injustice or whether it actually hoards racial and class advantage. The mothers are becoming aware that, perversely, it is through their white children's exposure to other “races” that they may advance. Recall Eva's comments. She spoke glowingly of her gifted daughter. She moved her family into one of the best (and most affluent) school districts in the area to provide her opportunities. When I spoke with Eva, she readily acknowledged that her actions reproduced racial privilege. She also pointed out that it required some family sacrifice: they had to accept a more modest house to afford a better school district. But, she said, what else could she do? I see mothering among the women that I spoke with as a moral practice. It is a cultivation of children's moral dispositions, including those pertaining to race. It also constitutes moral belonging. Motherhood was, for many of these women, a way to make concrete sense of Black suffering and death. They described to me how they came to imagine Michael Brown as their own child. They told me they could empathize with his mother's pain and loss. They portrayed motherhood as a commonality that transcends racial boundaries. They understood maternal sentiment as universal and natural, allowing them a pathway to make common cause with the Black mothers in their region with whom they otherwise had little connection. An outsider like myself could see, however, how much this “natural” maternal sentiment was in fact learned. I see this maternal imaginary as an instrument in an ethical practice, an attempt to incorporate a Black boy—often depicted as a Black “hulking” man in the media—into an imagined kinship that did not exist before. Many women I interviewed talked about the impact of the “Mother-to-Mother” talks that were held around the region after Brown's killing. Black mothers explained to predominantly white female audiences what is called “the talk”—the lesson Black parents give their sons on how to live and survive as young Black boys in a racist society. White women told me with teary eyes that they knew that their own boys were unlikely to experience police harassment and violence. They speculated with me during our conversations that their emotional response was about this unfairness and their long ignorance of this kind of racism. They knew but didn't know. Black death had not seemed real. They knew now it shouldn't be necessary to note that many Black children (and adults) have been killed before. The prolonged protests and national attention to “their city” prodded them to feel a Black mother's loss as their own. These formulations are mutually constituted by gender, motherhood, race, and morality. As much as the moral paradoxes expressed by the women I knew are grounded in the specific conjunctures of their time and place, they share in a longer history of moralizing racial identity. Such moralizing moves have been characterized as ahistorical, power evasive, and, more cynically, narcissistic (Ahmed 2004; Srivastava 2005; Sullivan 2014). Across the wide variety of colonial practices, globally, racial Others were constituted by their exclusion from moral reasoning and moral spaces, such as home and nation. For instance, the moral symbolism of whiteness is reflected in the association of white skin with virtue (Dyer 2017; Srivastava 2005, 32). White women, in particular, were cast as angelic figures at once protecting bourgeois morality and threatened by men of color on the American frontier and in the European colonies (Dyer 2017). Discourses that associate whiteness with purity, innocence, and morality continue to pervade dominant racial imaginaries. Notions of “good,” for example, take on concrete meaning through racial associations; for example, “good school,” “good neighborhood,” “good kids,” “good mothers” (Hagerman 2018). Even when whiteness is tacit, its “goodness” is assumed within common sense and validated through an implicit contrast with “bad” Black and brown spaces and people. White spaces and the lives that they afford have been historically imbued with “goodness,” the “good life” (Frankenberg 1993; Huber 2013). Even in antiracist organizations and social spaces, then, ways of articulating morality in conjunction with whiteness underpin activist self-identity and govern the regulation of interracial conduct. As Sarita Srivastava demonstrated in her study of feminist organizations, charges of racism were met with anger, fear, and tears, “in part produced by implied challenges to what counts as a good feminist, a good person, a good woman, and a good national citizen” (Srivastava 2005, 30). Racism, even when recognized by white people as structural or institutional, is nonetheless felt as an assault on the moral self. Accordingly, much antiracist work by and for white people is transmuted into preoccupations with morality and self. This “politics of self-transformation” (Sullivan 2014, 18) is “intensely individualistic” (Srivastava 2005, 39) and presumes that the locus of social change is in individual will and ethical self-regulation. Consequently, such politics are criticized for reproducing ideologies of individualism and autonomous agency. As such, these apparently political actions constitute “antipolitics” (Brown 2001). Yet listening to the racial anxieties expressed by women like Eva, I have come to see that their moralizing is driven by suspicion. They worry that their motivations might be suspect, that their white selves simply cannot have true good intentions, deep down. They understand the problems with individualism and structural racism; after all, those ideas are part of their learning about whiteness. Their problem is the unshakable feeling of uncertainty about their capacity to be and do good. Having learned to see their whiteness as opaque, these white people see their own intentions as untrustworthy. They learn to monitor themselves and other white people. A protester during Ferguson protests the week after Brown's killing, August 2014. (Adrian Octavius Walker) I saw this self-monitoring in one-on-one conversation and small group meetings, whether regular, semiformalized events or impromptu gatherings. I understood these events as technologies, in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as a means by which white folk monitor each other, interrogate themselves, and discover and develop capacities for uncovering their whiteness. Moral identities might be performed in these events, as others have documented (e.g., Ahmed 2004). On the whole, though, participants constantly revealed suspicion of “good white people,” derisively talking about them. Suspicion about claims to innocence and goodness was often called out by invoking the “good white person” and its various metonymic figures, including the “white savior,” the “fragile” white person, and “Becky.” People/women would catch themselves enacting “the good white person” and then openly display contrition, quietly remarking that they had “more to learn.” They not only were suspicious of the “good white person” but also distrusted their very selves. Their selves were obscured by a whiteness that resisted clear observation and frustrated attempts to construct coherent, transparent narratives about themselves in a racialized world. They questioned their own motivations, were unsure of their actions, and described moving through once-familiar spaces and common happenings awkwardly, unnaturally. Such disclosures baffled me. With the women I was closest to, I could ask them directly whether they were as distrustful of themselves as they professed. All confirmed that they were indeed suspicious of their white selves and corroborated with stories of their own racism and, importantly, their family's. Beverly, a white woman in her 30s with a graduate degree in social work, told a group of us in her home about a Thanksgiving incident—an all too common setting for family melodrama. She and her father were returning from an errand. As they pulled their car up the driveway behind her brother's car, her brother, Beverly said, angrily puffed out his chest, as if ready to fight, and marched toward her father's car. Her brother, who lived across the country, didn't recognize the car and was ready to throw its door open when Beverly lowered the tinted window and asked what was going on. He replied, “I would've called the cops if you were Black.” Looking at the group of us, she asked, “How were we raised?” At the same dinner, Kelly, another young professional white woman, offered a story about herself, which, she said, she only recently remembered. She was a young girl and at the airport. She saw a Black man (whom she described as “beautifully dressed”), then turned to her mother and asked, “Mommy, do you think he has a gun?” These kinds of stories are not merely confessions of either their own or loved ones’ racism. There is a cultural efficacy to confession. It is not just performance of racial sincerity and remorse, however. When women revealed these moments, they were not necessarily looking for sympathy about what it is like to cope with racist relatives. They were quite sincerely wondering how white racist selves can come to be. If Beverly's brother was so vehemently racist, did not his view also implicate herself? They were, after all, blood-related siblings raised in the same house. If Kelly's younger self was also once so afraid of Black men, can that fear truly be gone from her present self?4 During my research, many white women have asked me how they should live as a white person in this world (Sullivan 2014). For them, this is the defining question of ethics: How am I supposed to live with myself as a white person? They ask again and again. They've disclosed to me fleeting thoughts, images, and feelings that they know or intuit to be racist. They've heard other white people, intimates and strangers, joke about Blacks and others, and spit out disturbing characterizations. Those kinds of statements are too familiar; they've heard them too often. They wonder if they, too, are capable of such sentiments. And they recognize that they can understand how those whites can say such things. As one said, “I know how they think.” And another, “I know the racist heart.” The racist heart is familiar, too familiar, for them to believe themselves to be innocent. They are reminded of their own racist inner selves when other white people, caught on social media doing racist things, defend themselves with “It wasn't my intention to hurt” or “It was just a joke.” This was drawn out by actor Liam Neeson's admission of violent racist fantasies and by Virginia governor Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook page, which featured a photo of a man in blackface and another in a Klu Klux Klan outfit. One middle-aged mother I knew was upset not just because both denied their own racism. This was common enough, she said. It was because she could imagine herself harming a person of color with thoughtless words and thinking, “That wasn't my intention.” She, like others I came to know, wondered if her sense of herself as a good, decent person was merely a facade, a mask of etiquette, a self-delusion. How could they trust themselves? Good intentions were not enough. They continued to harm people of color, as many confessed. Such moments involve agency anxiety. This anxiety is a symptom of the present conjunctural moment—of post–civil rights color-blind common sense; neoliberal precarity, felt as middle-class insecurity and national decline; and the incorporation of therapeutic technologies and self-improvement discourses in diversity and inclusion practice. This conjuncture has exacerbated what historian Richard Hofstadter, commenting on the mood in late 1964 that led to Barry Goldwater's nomination to the Republican presidential candidate, described as “the paranoid style in American politics” (Hofstadter 1964). My argument is not to ratify conspiracy theory or paranoid thinking; rather, I propose, following Susan Harding and Kathleen Stewart, that conspiracy theories are best understood as a cultural idiom indexing the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions animating the current cultural-political order (Harding and Stewart 2003). Conspiracy theories articulate a sense that there are dark and mysterious forces at work in the world. They signal a loss of control that warrants suspicion around the motivations of large organizations, governments, social institutions, and racial Others. The reasons for economic gain and loss, for example, seem unknowable. Unprecedented gains in the stock market are coupled with long-standing economic decline in rural and deindustrializing communities. Neoliberal financialization obfuscates wealth generation, as “workplace and labor, especially work-and-place securely rooted in stable local context, are no longer prime sites of value and identity” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 4). Such lack of transparency, as noted by Marc Edelman (2020, forthcoming), lends itself to competing, contradictory, and even outlandish explanations and to scapegoating, “often advanced by financial actors themselves” (Clapp 2014, 798). Edelman (2020) adds, “People trying to understand what has happened to their communities increasingly fall back on conspiracy theories and ‘post-factual’ claims.” The civil rights movement did not lead to mutual understanding between Black (and brown) and white people. The color-blind politics of “postracial” America have stoked mutual suspicion and resentment. As explicit discrimination is outlawed, and explicit expressions of racial animus are publicly censured, racial etiquette and politeness govern interracial interaction. We do not know what the Other is really thinking and feeling. There is, as John L. Jackson (2008, xiv) contends in Racial Paranoia, an “ambiguous and non-falsifiable sense of racial distrust … at the heart of the new reality of race in America.” Many people feel that the current cultural-political climate in the United States is saturated with suspicion and anxiety.5 This anxiety incites paranoia of external threats, and for middle-class white women, it also compels an internalized suspicion of one's own agency, even for one's own capacity for self-knowledge and action. For the middle-class white women in my study, their white selves were experienced as almost inscrutable to their own understanding. Given this pervasive atmosphere of suspicion of Others and self, it then becomes newly interesting to recognize that many of these women participate in antiracist workshops and white caucusing (white-people's-only discussion and interrogation of their whiteness). Notably, a large number had attended Witnessing Whiteness (a white-people's-only racial awareness program; Kwon 2020), and some continue on what they call “the learning” as facilitators. They were motivated to learn more about themselves, about what it meant to be white in a city shaken by Brown's death. They told me that they were shamed by what they learned, about the depths of their ignorance. They felt betrayed by their parents and white society in general for conspiring to blind them from racial realities. Yet their learning did not give them the confidence to act. My ethnographic discussions with them about their self-development revealed how the technologies of self in diversity and inclusion work contribute to a hermeneutics of suspicion, on the one hand, and a construction of opaque white selves on the other. Concepts like “implicit bias,” “microaggressions,” and, prominently, “white privilege,” circulate across formal and informal organizations and gatherings. These concepts institute a shared vocabulary that in turn organizes emergent counternetworks of white identity formation. In practice, these concepts offer shared guides (analytical mirrors) for self-examination and social monitoring. They are easily cited to explain the depth of racial inequity and white complicity. The people who use them do so to acknowledge the harm they have caused and the privilege they have accrued because of their whiteness. Yet in my observations and conversation, such acknowledgments, ironically, only obscure their sense of agency, their capacity to be and act with “goodness.” Each concept, as they understand it, locates the harm they do outside their individual intention. The racism, “their racist heart,” dwells in unconscious, reflexive behavior, thought, and feeling. It is in them; as many remarked, it is “baked in.” While we may critique those concepts as ways of deflecting individual blame, or in the words of an antiracist activist colleague, of placating fragile white folk, the folks I worked with did not evade blame. Rather, they compulsively self-examine, scan, for signs of hidden intention, the racist heart of their white selves. They emphasize the need to be “hypervigilant,” held accountable, “remain with the discomfort.” This notion of embracing “discomfort” is associated with authenticity and is a dominant part of the ethos of diversity and inclusion pedagogy. It frames the importance of wary self-examination and criticism and for developing the skills and capacity to decipher the signs, symptoms, and portents of whiteness. Eva and the women I spoke with had come to understand that they were formed by a racist world, but in doing so, they came to embody the deep anxieties indexing the “stresses, contradictions, and dreams of redemption of a subject under the influence of diffuse and haunting social, political and discursive force fields” (Harding and Stewart 2003, 264). They showed urgent yearning for self-realization and authenticity. Such yearning was also clearly imbricated with therapeutic culture and neoliberal compulsions for self-improvement (Illouz 2008; Rose 1999). This yearning, moreover, was intensified “agency anxiety,” which was in turn inflected by an occlusion of the white self. As I carry out this research, I often come back to Sara Ahmed's (2004, 6) analysis of whiteness studies. She asks, “Is a whiteness that is anxious about itself—its narcissism, its egoism, its privilege, its self-centeredness—better?” I am not sure it is. White racial sincerity is a knotty problem in its own right. It is then also difficult for white people to translate work on their selves into social-political action. The self-interrogation of whiteness can, perversely, also become a defense of white supremacy or the status quo. Many people I encountered in diversity spaces admitted as much. While I've chosen not to more fully examine class in this essay, I'd like to briefly consider the women's understanding of their privilege. The women I spoke with can clearly articulate the material benefits of whiteness. They've learned to explain the institutionalization of racial inequality. But in their usual worry about whiteness, privilege is disentangled from class, eliding any critical discussion of capitalism. In fact, in ABAR pedagogy white people are warned that their discussions of class are often means to evade the real emotional work of interrogating their whiteness. Consequently, their primary focus remains on whiteness, morality, and self-improvement. Not often in group discussions did this question arise: What are we willing to risk? The rank and reputation of our children's schools? The comfort and security of our neighborhoods? Increased taxes? Too often, the answer has been not enough.