When I was younger, I fully bought into the lie that white people tell you about being scared of you. You know what I’m talking about.

They’re just not used to your culture. They’re scared of you and that’s why they call the authorities on you and if you just find a way to calm them down with your body language and words, then they’ll stop. They’re scared of being infected by you, of being overtaken by you. They’re afraid of being replaced. Something about your presence triggers some kind of deeply rooted resentment that they were taught in the past and you just have to wait for them to move past all of that to live.

I’m here to tell you today that white people are not scared of you.

They’re not scared of you. They know that you are a child who is staying up every night imagining scenario after scenario because you’re scared that your parents will get deported. They understand that you are here to serve them food and to wait on their needs. They know that you are subject to the whims of management. They’re not scared of you. They know who you are and they’re not scared of that.

You can try to comply. You can make yourself smaller and you can learn all of their words. You can keep calm and use your words to fit yourself into their categories but that compliance won’t protect you because they are not actually afraid of you. You can perform submission all you like but that submission won’t protect you against their fear because their fear is not real. They’re not scared of you.

They’re not actually scared of being infected by you, overtaken by you, or replaced by you.

When white people enter into a space where their whiteness is not the dominant mode of operation and there are consequences for racist behavior, they actually behave better. They learn more. They are less likely to bully or talk over or scapegoat and blame. And it’s worth reminding here that whiteness doesn’t need to be dominant. We call people of color the people of the global majority for a reason. Europe, enlarged on most maps, is actually just a small peninsula.

What they’re scared of isn’t you—they’re scared of dwindling resources. They know that capitalism is wasteful, that this system of extraction doesn’t honor the cycle of life by giving back when it takes, and they are scared of being left out by other white people. That’s what they fear. They’re not actually scared of you because they know that you have less power than they do and that your chances of survival are lower.

They will only call the authorities on you to kidnap you and detain you when they know that you have little political power. Look at how they treat rich immigrants who possess the cash needed to sue.

Under white supremacy, you experience more danger when you have less power. That’s why you have all of these corporate style trainings about taking up more space. It actually works to some extent. Your smallness and perceived helplessness will not protect you.

White supremacy is not a fear based ideology. Fear is a real emotion and tells us about real dangers. White supremacy is a paranoid ideology. It manufactures social phobias because it follows the coward’s way. Cowards look for people to blame to avoid taking responsibility for taking care of the world. White supremacy is an ideological system that aligns with capitalism because it promotes shortsightedness and makes us think that alienation is an innate part of human nature.

“Humans are bad for nature.” “People naturally don’t trust what is different from them.” “We fear outsiders.” Those are the tenets of white supremacy. They’re not true. They are lies.

Humans can cultivate our reality and take care of other species. People have been making relationships across differences since forever and we know how. Biology promotes diversity. Fear is an emotion and emotions are not ahistorical identities but live embedded in our social histories.

White supremacy lies to you. That’s why changing your behaviors to become more compliant doesn’t work. It’s not actually about you. The same way that patriarchy isn’t about women but about men’s relationships with other men, white supremacy is about white people’s relationships with other white people. They don’t want to be left out by those groups. They’re not afraid of you because they have legally enforced political power over you.

This article is just a reminder. Shit has been bananas lately. Let’s try to keep our minds clear.