White Grief: When Empathy Hits Its Edge

There Are Moments When Grief Doesn’t Arrive Softly

There are moments when grief doesn’t arrive softly.

It doesn’t knock.

It crashes in.

For many white women, the murder of Renea Good by ICE was one of those moments. Not because state violence is new, and not because Black and Brown communities haven’t been naming this reality for generations, but because for some of us, the proximity finally felt close enough to shatter the illusion that this system is mostly benign.

And still, even in that shattering, something remained buffered.

This is where white grief lives.

White grief is not the same as white pain. It is not the same as racialized trauma. And it is not evidence that we “finally get it.” White grief is a specific emotional experience shaped by distance, by protection, and by a lifetime of not having to imagine ourselves or our children as the default targets of state violence.

That distinction matters more than our intentions.

What White Grief Actually Is

White grief often shows up as shock. As disbelief. As How could this happen? It is grief born from disruption, not from saturation.

For Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, images of violence are not isolated events. They stack. They accumulate. They echo ancestral memory. Research on racial trauma shows that repeated exposure to violence against one’s racial group creates ongoing psychological stress, even when the individual is not directly involved (1). This is known as vicarious racial trauma, and it operates much like PTSD.

White Americans, by contrast, are not socially conditioned to expect harm. When violence occurs, it feels exceptional. When BIPOC communities witness violence, it often feels confirmatory.

This is not about desensitization. That word is frequently misused.

BIPOC people do not become numb to violence against their communities. They become hyper-aware. The nervous system stays activated because it has learned that danger is not theoretical (2).

White nervous systems, protected by systems built in our image, retain the privilege of surprise.

The Empathy Gap We Don’t Like to Name

Many white women genuinely believe they are being fully empathetic. And emotionally, that may feel true.

I believed that about myself.

On the podcast, as I was processing the murder of Renea Good in real time, I caught myself saying something that startled me. I noticed that while I felt deep compassion when I saw ICE violence against people of color, I often read, reacted, and moved on. This time, I couldn’t. I kept watching. I kept searching for more information. And eventually I had to ask the question I didn’t want to ask: Why did this one pull me in further?

That moment forced me to confront the difference between empathy and proximity. I wasn’t less empathetic before. But I was more insulated.

Research consistently shows an empathy gap along racial lines. Studies in social psychology demonstrate that white participants often underestimate the pain, fear, and emotional complexity of Black and Brown individuals, even when consciously committed to fairness (3). This isn’t because white people lack empathy. It’s because empathy is shaped by identification.

As I said on the episode, this was the first time I truly understood, not intellectually, but viscerally, why violence against someone who looks like you grabs your nervous system. Why it doesn’t just sadden you, but scares you.

We instinctively empathize more deeply with those we can imagine ourselves being.

When violence happens to someone who does not look like us, our grief still passes through a filter. A subtle one. A socially inherited one. A filter that says: This is tragic, but it is not inevitable for me.

That filter is white supremacy functioning quietly, not as hatred, but as insulation.

When Awareness Meets Its Edge

I want to name something uncomfortable, because I think many white women feel it but rarely say it out loud.

When Renea Good was killed, I didn’t just feel sadness. I felt fear.

Not because violence against immigrants or people of color hadn’t already horrified me, it had. But because this violence crossed an invisible psychological boundary. It landed closer to my body. My life. My imagined safety.

That realization didn’t bring shame, but it did bring grief of a different kind. Grief for how much I still have to unlearn. Grief for the limits of empathy I thought I had already surpassed.

This is the edge where awareness often falters. Not because we don’t know enough, but because knowing hasn’t yet required us to reimagine our own vulnerability.

Why White Grief Can Become Harmful

White grief becomes dangerous when it centers white feelings over systemic reality.

When the focus shifts to how devastated we are, how overwhelmed we feel, how hard it is to keep watching, the emotional labor is once again displaced onto the very communities experiencing the harm.

This pattern is well-documented in critical race theory and abolitionist scholarship. Robin DiAngelo’s work on white fragility outlines how white emotional responses can derail conversations about structural violence by recentralizing white comfort (4). While her work is often debated, the underlying dynamic is supported by broader research on racial power and emotional regulation.

Grief is not neutral. It can either move us toward accountability or pull us back into avoidance.

The History We Cannot Grieve Without

ICE did not emerge in a vacuum. It is the modern enforcement arm of a long history of racialized border control, surveillance, and criminalization rooted in white nationalism (5).

From the Chinese Exclusion Act to Operation Wetback to contemporary detention centers, immigration enforcement has always been about preserving a racial and economic hierarchy. Understanding this history reframes individual acts of violence not as failures of the system, but as expressions of it.

White culture teaches us to mourn outcomes without interrogating origins.

But grief without context becomes performance.

Sitting With the Discomfort We Want to Escape

In my own processing, what I’ve had to confront is this: my grief still comes with an exit ramp.

I can turn off the news. I can step away. I can regulate my nervous system without fearing that the next headline will involve someone who looks like me.

That doesn’t make me bad.

But it does expose something more unsettling: the ability to walk away is not neutral.

When we disengage, when we choose relief over reckoning, we are not opting out of harm. I am opting out of responsibility.

Avoidance may soothe my nervous system, but it also preserves the very conditions that allow this violence to continue. In that sense, walking away isn’t just understandable, it’s irresponsible. And, frankly, it’s foolish to believe that insulation will hold forever.

Responsibility is the bridge between white grief and meaningful solidarity.

As Resmaa Menakem reminds us, racialized trauma lives in the body, not just in ideology (6). If white women want to move beyond intellectual allyship, we have to let our bodies feel the truth of our position in the hierarchy, without rushing to absolution.

What White Women Can Do With White Grief

White grief is not the end point.It is raw material.

It can be metabolized into action when we:

• Stop seeking reassurance from BIPOC voices

• Stay present past the emotional spike

• Learn the history we were never taught

• Support abolitionist and community-led efforts materially

• Let grief sharpen political clarity rather than dull it

White grief should not ask to be held.It should ask to be transformed.

Closing Invitation

If you are a white woman feeling shaken, undone, or destabilized by this moment, your grief is not wrong.

But it is not the whole story.

Let it open you.

Let it educate you.

Let it move you out of emotional identification and into structural responsibility.

Because for too many people, this is not a moment.

It is a lifetime.

Stay curious, be open and keep waking up,

Jonelle

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This article draws from conversations featured in the White Women Wake Up podcast, Season 2, Episode 7: “When Empathy Isn’t Equal: White Grief, Fear, and the Limits of Awareness,” aired on January 30, 2026. In this episode, Karen and Jonelle grapple with the concept of white grief in the aftermath of the murder of Renea Good, examining how proximity, fear, and inherited insulation shape white women’s emotional responses to state violence, and why awareness without sustained responsibility can quietly reinforce the very systems we seek to dismantle.

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References

1. Comas-Díaz, L., Hall, G. N., & Neville, H. A. (2019). Racial trauma: Theory, research, and healing. American Psychologist.

2. Carter, R. T. (2007). Racism and psychological and emotional injury. The Counseling Psychologist.

3. Waytz, A., Hoffman, K. M., & Trawalter, S. (2015). A superhumanization bias in whites’ perceptions of Blacks. Social Psychological and

Personality Science.

4. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility. Beacon Press.

5. Ngai, M. M. (2004). Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press.

6. Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother’s Hands. Central Recovery Press.