Beyond Whiteness, Beyond White Womanhood:

Reclaiming Humanity in a White Body

By: Vix Burgett-Prunty

Before I was white, I was free.

I was a runner. I was silly. I played in the sun, in the sand, in the rain and mud, and in the snow. I slept deeply. I played in leaves and fished in ponds. Before I was white, I only had the thoughts of myself. When I was hungry, thirsty, or needed care. My world was my body, my curiosity, and my joy.

Then whiteness found me. It came with rules. Pretend other people’s pain doesn’t hurt you. Focus on yourself (but really, focus on a shrinking circle of others until only you remain, isolated). It demanded detachment, superiority, and a performance of ease. I abandoned my instincts to wear its mask.

But whiteness wasn’t the only script forced upon me. Womanhood arrived too, with its own cruel expectations. Be cute. Be sweet. Be small. Never serious. Never difficult. Never real. When my parents’ emotions overflowed, I became their keeper. I soothed storms I didn’t create, learning early that my worth lived in how little space I took up. I mastered the art of self-erasure. For decades, I betrayed my gut to wear these costumes. I managed my parents’ emotions. My instincts screamed, “This is wrong!” Whiteness called it sensitivity.

My gut, that primal, knowing voice, was silenced daily. I was told I was “too sensitive,” “overthinking,” and “imagining things.” Whiteness weaponized my womanhood. My body wasn’t mine. It was a tool for peacekeeping, comfort, and convenience. I laughed when I wanted to rage. I swallowed “no” when I felt danger. I let boundaries crumble because “they didn’t mean it.” Every compromise was a betrayal of the child who once trusted rain and mud and hunger.

I repeated the pattern with my own children. Giving them my anxiety when they cried, my guilt when they needed it, and my hollow smile when I was breaking. I called it love. It wasn’t. It was abuse, cyclical and unconscious. I was trying to be better, but I was parenting from a wound, not wisdom. Womanhood called it hysteria.

When I abandoned whiteness, I unraveled. A European American body holding generations of harm, atrocities outsourced, and inequalities upheld. No guilt. Duty. The understanding that my rights on this earth demand equal responsibility to this earth.

Rejected by the community that defined me, adrift among others where I still felt incomplete, I faced a void. But in that emptiness, a truth emerged: Whiteness isn’t a biological destiny. It’s a social contract, one I could break. My responsibility wasn’t to carry guilt but to confront the atrocities European Americans committed or outsourced, past and present. To acknowledge that our rights on this planet are equal to our responsibilities. No more, no less.

When I shed womanhood, I stood whole. Born in a body society gendered female, yet never its “ideal.” Not broken. Not wrong. My non-binary truth wasn’t a rebellion. It was a homecoming. Who decided my body should mean “woman”? Who decided my existence needed fixing?

Photo by Alexander Grey

I was assigned female, but I was never the woman society demanded. Whiteness told me to detach; womanhood told me to disappear. Neither fits. I had spent a lifetime believing my body, my instincts, and my very being were defective. Too much, too loud, too wrong. But who decided that? Who declared that the woman I am, with my gut, my rage, and my refusal to perform, is broken? Why isn’t my body, exactly as it exists, exactly what a woman is meant to be?

The answer is power. Systems thrive when they convince you that not fitting the mold is a personal failure. That your body is a project. That your intuition is irrational. But molds are cages. Projects are violations. Intuition is the compass that survived every silencing.

This is my pro-humanity reckoning.

My white body is neutral. It carries history but isn’t inherently oppressive. I wield its privilege to dismantle systems, not perpetuate them. My ancestors’ crimes don’t stain my hands, but their unaddressed legacy demands my hands work. My complicity is my responsibility.

I see it clearly now. I wasn’t failing at whiteness or womanhood. They were failing me. My so-called “non-conformity” wasn’t brokenness. My body isn’t flawed; it’s proof. My gut isn’t faulty; it’s my birthright. Ignoring it for others’ comfort isn’t kindness; it’s the deepest betrayal.

Abandoning whiteness led me home to myself. It forced me to dismantle other lies: that sweetness is strength, that self-sacrifice is love, and that womanhood is a performance of fragility. The child who played in the mud is still here. Not untouched, but awake. She reminds me that joy and justice aren’t opposites. That care begins with sovereignty. That breaking cycles isn’t guilt, but liberation.

My non-binary truth is my compass. Rejecting gender constructs freed me to trust my gut. When I silenced intuition to perform “woman,” I betrayed humanity’s diversity. Now I honor the body I have while rejecting the boxes assigned to it.

Breaking cycles is my atonement. I ended the lie that love requires self-destruction. When I stopped forcing my children to soothe my wounds, I honored their humanity. I hope they will honor others’ humanity as well.

I belong nowhere and everywhere. European heritage isn’t my cage. It’s soil where I plant accountability. Rejected by whiteness? Good. Unbound by gender? Free. My community is now those building a world where bodies aren’t battlegrounds, care isn’t extraction, and difference isn’t deviance.

The child who fished in ponds knew this truth:

We are all worthy because we exist.

No whiteness to flee. No womanhood to perform. Just a human in a white body, holding complexity. Grief for harms done by my lineage. Joy in my unbounded self. Fury at systems that tried to break me. Certainty that my gut was right all along. I am not “fine.” I am alive. I am accountable. I am a work in progress.

I am exactly who I am.

And that is not just fine.

It is freedom.

This is my pro-humanity manifesto:

Show up as yourself. Clean up your mess. Make room for others to breathe.