The cumulative danger of safeguarding purity revealed itself in the election of Trump, and again in how white liberals tried to explain away his win. In “The First White President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates unpacks why white liberals attributed Trump’s win to the white working class alone, and not to the white supremacy from which we all benefit:

“The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony—even after a black president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses, instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.”

The use of “existential” is instructive. As someone who already believes life is meaningless and random, it is not a stretch to understand that I have survived and succeeded not solely on merit, but because of my various privileges. That makes my specialness less special, and it makes the system that’s believed in me less reliable, which is a bummer for my idea of myself, but oh well. Maybe I should cultivate qualities, relationships, and knowledge which make me more comfortable with myself than benefiting from violent systems ever should. Or maybe, if it seems my impostor syndrome/inferiority complex isn’t going anywhere, I should accept my existential despair but stop making it other people’s problem. Huh, it seems this is too complex a thought train to try and get into on social media. I also don’t want to crowd people’s feeds with an unspoken ask that they absolve my guilt with likes and retweets and replies. Plus, I’m getting the sense that this is something I’ll be grappling with my whole life and not resolve in a thread this one afternoon and just move on from. Another thing I should work on, then, is living with discomfort. Huh, I am finding it very…uncomfortable. But even more discomfort is created in the friction between this existential discomfort and my resisting it. Perhaps I can take the second discomfort down a notch by accepting the first. There. Now that I am no longer infantilizing myself by thinking America is a meritocracy, it seems I am stronger and smarter and even more capable of complex thought than I was back when I was worried about being not special, unintelligent, et al. Plus, understanding my privilege and power, how they manifest and the impact they can have, means I am less likely to abuse them and more likely to use them for good. This is a start. Still hard, but not that hard. Not the hardest thing anyone has ever done, at all.