Would you be progressive if you were born white?

on projection, identity, and the Sylvia Plath discourse

Not just white, but wealthy, straight, able-bodied, and untouched by the usual catalysts of political awakening—would your social and political beliefs be the same? Would you care about the same things in the same way?

Allyship today often relies on the empathy of our oppressors. “What if this were your daughter?” or “What if this were happening in your country?”. Our pain is too often filtered through someone else’s imagination to be taken seriously. As if our suffering only matters when it becomes hypothetical white suffering.

But what about the rest of us? We focus on what it takes to make the powerful care, but we rarely ask what motivates the already oppressed when we claim to stand with one another.

The uncomfortable truth is that we might not be so different from white people and their empathy workshops. Much of what passes for solidarity is simply a projection of seeing our pain in someone else’s experiences. Empathy gives shape to care, but it can also flatten differences. It turns others into mirrors that are only useful when they reflect something back at us.

The point isn’t that white people can’t be “woke”. It’s that any of us, regardless of identity, might be overestimating how principles our politics really are.

We look back at those who failed our modern standards and wonder how they could have been so blind. But would we have been any different if we were in their place?

John Rawls once proposed a thought experiment to explore this idea. The “veil of ignorance” involves designing a society without knowing who you would be in it. You could be rich or poor, white or black, abled or disabled. Behind the veil, the only rational choice is to create a just society where everyone is protected equally. Because, if you create any hierarchies, you might be born as someone on the bottom. “The principles of justice,” he said, “are chosen behind a veil or ignorance.”

What’s striking is that few of us apply this veil inward. Would I still care about immigration if I had never feared a border? Would I still fight for racial justice if my own skin wasn’t oppressed?

The Rawlsian veil reveals the quiet conditionality of our commitments. It reminds us that justice isn’t about protecting other versions of ourselves, but about protecting people whose oppression we may never understand.

For the marginalized, solidarity is expected to be automatic. Queer communities, immigrants, people of color—we’re assumed to intuitively recognize each other’s pain. If you’ve suffered, then you’ll understand when someone else suffers too.

But that’s not always how it works. Often, we’re not seeing them, but simply seeing ourselves in them.

It’s easy for a queer person to have a sense of understanding towards Black struggle, especially when it comes to police violence. Surveillance, public shaming, and the fear of feeling unsafe in your own body are all familiar queer experiences.

But how often does that solidarity come from truly understanding structural anti-Blackness, and not just a projection of their own experiences? We can say we “see ourselves” in their struggle, but that may be exactly the problem.

Neuroscientist Jean Decety has shown that empathy isn’t an inherently moral emotion. It’s shaped by a flexible, often biased response shaped by our perceptions of who deserves our care. His research shows that people experience stronger empathic responses towards those they perceive as similar to their “in-group”. And weaker responses are recorded towards those marked as “others”.¹

In other words, empathy has its politics. It’s not an impartial bridge between self and other. It’s a mirror angled by culture, familiarity, and bias.

This is the trap of resemblance. We don’t “feel with” others, but simply recognize ourselves in them. And if we can’t, our empathy falters.

That isn’t to say personal experience can’t be a useful entry point to solidarity. This initial connection can eventually evolve into deeper, more principled struggles. But when resemblance becomes the basis of our care, it hinders the development of a more inclusive and sustained commitment to justice.

The increased global attention on Palestine recently has revealed just how fickle solidarity can be when resemblance fails. The violence there is imperial, religious, and territorial. It doesn’t map neatly onto Western liberal frameworks. Some queer people hesitate to support Palestine because they fear defending a majority-Muslim country whose occupants may be homophobic. Some diasporic groups who have survived cultural erasure struggle with the discourse surrounding antisemitism and Jewish identity.

Even among the historically oppressed, solidarity clearly has its limits. And those limits are rarely about principles, but about resonance.

Most of the suffering others experience won’t feel personal. Which is why solidarity, real solidarity, can’t be something you earn by being marginalized. It must become a more conscious choice.

The real test isn’t whether we care when something affects us, but whether we’ll still care when it doesn’t. That kind of selfless, uncomfortable solidarity is far less common that we would like to admit.

Without community there is no liberation…But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Another uncomfortable issue to deal with is that, sometimes, it’s easier to know what’s right when you’re the one being wronged.

Oppression provides a kind of moral clarity. Not in the suffering itself, but in the way it orients you in the world. When the world harms you, the lines are clear. You know who the enemy is and you know what side you’re on. So it’s not surprising that people cling to their identities. To lose that moral grounding can feel disorienting.

So, if we had been born into power and comfort, would our ethics hold? Would we still know who to root for?

Most people want to say yes. But, in practice, solidarity is often tied to identification. For some, being oppressed is the only framework through which empathy makes emotional sense.

Multiple studies and works have explored how deeply engraved white hierarchy is in our systems and structures. White Americans will even go as far as to support policies that uphold these racial hierarchies, even when those same policies harm their own health or well-being.²³ This pursuit of white dominance, of maintaining the structures that they have grown comfortable with, is ultimately more important to white people than their own safety.⁴

In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills’ describes how white people are socialized into a “cognitive distortion” that renders them oblivious to the systemic advantages they hold. This “epistemology of ignorance” ensures that white people remain comfortable within the racial hierarchy, often denying or minimizing the existence of systemic racism.

The uncomfortable extension of this logic is that if socialization into dominance produces such a strong blindness to it, then any group born into that same dominance might be equally susceptible. This distortion isn’t inherent to whiteness, but to power. And that means that if you had been born into power, you likely wouldn’t be immune to the same epistemologies. This isn’t a moral failing of any specific group, but a structural condition. Power clouds the moral imagination. And no one, not even the historically oppressed, is automatically exempt from that cloud.

All human beings are bound by identical obligations, although these are performed in different ways according to particular circumstances.
—Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

There’s a familiar discomfort in revisiting historic figures we admire and realizing that their worldviews don’t quite align with our own. Sylvia Plath’s racial blind spots. Hemingway’s hyper-masculine worldview. Virginia Woolf’s classism and casual antisemitism. We notice the gaps in their progressiveness and ask if we can still admire the works of someone whose social and political views were flawed.

This isn’t a new issue, but the internet, especially recently, has amplified its volume. It might seem strange to hold a dead person accountable for beliefs that were common in their time, but the impulse isn’t always misplaced. Sometimes it really is necessary.

Interrogating the legacies of influential figures isn’t demanding perfection but resisting the erasure of harm. Especially when those figures are still shaping culture today. The works of Plath or Woolf don’t just live in syllabi, but in the values, aesthetics, and culture of today. To remember only their brilliance and none of their biases is to risk romanticizing an inaccurate history.

Sylvia Plath at Smith College, April 1954. Photo: by Judy Snow Denison

That said, I believe we also need to make space for complexity. It’s possible to acknowledge a figure’s influence while still holding their flaws to light. Accountability isn’t always erasure. Sometimes, it simply means the process of reworking admiration with the truth.

Still, moral clarity tends to arrive from particular vantage points. When you grow up in racial, cultural, and structural margins, you don’t need a political awakening. Because you are the political condition. You learn early on what it means to be excluded, to be flattened into your identity and caricatured. You learn it in the curriculum you learn, the tone of voice people take when they speak to you, from the looks on the street. And with that comes a moral height not born of virtue, but of forced perspective.

Which is why, for many of us who aren’t white, it feels so obvious what is wrong with the beliefs they had. We see the harm in these legends not because we’re actually more ethical than them, but because we were its targets. And so we look back with moral superiority.

But clarity isn’t the same as inherent goodness. We forget that if we had been born into their families, raised in their neighborhoods, seen the world through their skin, we may have seen just as little as they did. Many of them likely didn’t write from a place of genuine hatred, but from the limits of what they were given. Their world was curated by the books they read, the conversations at the dinner table and the borders of their social and political world.

To see with such clarity is a gift. But it is not the same as being inherently good.

The idea that people of the past were uniquely cruel is a comforting one. It lets us believe that bigotry is rare and always rooted in individual failure. But that’s not always how it works. Prejudice is often the default for people in power and, unless something interrupts it, it usually remains unchanged.

Progressivism, too, isn’t always a sign of individual moral strength. Often, it’s a symptom of access. Access to different people, different ideas, different norms. If you grew up surrounded by diversity, or have known exclusion yourself, you’re more likely to see what others might be able to ignore.

In this way, moral clarity is also a kind of privilege. Would Plath have written differently if she’d grown up reading Toni Morrison instead of Thomas Hardy? Would Hemingway have seen the people he flattened if he had lived among them, instead of just writing them into his ports and brothels? If we had been raised in their world, would everything seem so obvious now?

The point isn’t to excuse the harm they did. But to understand how that harm was made to feel ordinary.

Virginia Woolf, June 1926. Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell. National Portrait Gallery, London

There are, even now, minorities who align with conservative politics. Immigrants who vote for Trump. Women who oppose pro-choice abortion laws. People who, by virtue of their marginalization, are assumed to naturally side with justice. And yet they don’t. If moral clarity isn’t guaranteed by identity in the present, how can we expect it from the privileged dead? From people born into entirely different moral languages and social systems.

This isn’t a plea for moral relativism, but a call for moral perspective. Obviously not everyone who lived before the 1990s was racist, sexist, or homophobic. But many lived in cultures where those ideologies were not just tolerated, they were ambient. Absorbed through media, made ordinary through repetition. There’s a difference between someone who was actively hateful and someone who simply saw little else.

And while there is value in examining a figure’s blind spots, I’m not entirely convinced we always need to extract retroactive purity from the dead. Plath can’t clarify what her views were. Woolf can’t revise what she left unsaid. To scrutinize their worldviews is to hold them to modern standards of a world they never knew.

We aren’t born prejudiced in the womb but learn to treat strangers differently by example.
—Toni Morrison, On the origins of prejudice

The actual question isn’t whether you would still believe in justice if you were born white, or rich, or male. It’s whether your belief in justice is strong enough to survive the loss of your own proximity to marginalization.

If your politics are designed to make your past self proud, or your imagined self look good, or your worse self seem redeemable, then they’re still about you.

The point isn’t to imagine being someone else, but to build a moral framework that holds even when you are not the center of its gravity. One that doesn’t depend on identity for orientation. Or doesn’t collapse when it stops being personally flattering.

What exactly are your values worth if they couldn’t survive a reversal of your personhood?

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1

Jean Decety and Claus Lamm. “Human Empathy Through the Lens of Social Neuroscience.” The Scientific World Journal, vol. 6, 2006. doi: 10.1100/tsw.2006.221

2

Michael Tesler. Post-Racial or Most-Racial? Race and Politics in the Obama Era. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

3

Joseph E. Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren. Race and American Political Development. Routledge, 2008.

Joe R. Feagin. Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression. Routledge, 2006.

4.