My grandmother grew up under the wicked regime of Jim and Jane Crow. Like many other black Americans she escaped to a northern American city during the Great Migration that occurred after World War II. I remember her telling me that the average white person wouldn’t survive being black for even a day. They would die from stress and anxiety.

I believe that she may have been exaggerating. But her observation does get to something real about the way white privilege manifests. Research suggests that the average white American has no basic idea about how white racism and white supremacy impact the day-to-day lives and life chances of non-whites. In fact, social psychology experiments have shown that white folks believe that not having access to television is a far greater hardship than being black. This absurdity is compounded by the belief, demonstrated in recent surveys, that in the Age of Obama, “discrimination” against white people is now a bigger problem in the United States than racism against people of color.

In all, white privilege is a system that gives unearned advantages to white people because of their perceived racial group membership. Those unearned advantages in turn nurture and cultivate a deficit in coping skills. (This is not a function of race, but rather of power. Men likely have worse life coping skills relative to women, and straight people less so than those in the LGBT community.) This should not be a surprise. White America was built upon stolen land, income, labor and wealth, taken from First Nations, African-Americans and other people of color. More recently, the modern white American middle class was created through transfer payments and government subsidies such as the G.I. Bill and VA/FHA housing programs, opportunities that were systematically denied to black and brown Americans. Racism (and sexism) in the American labor force meant that jobs which earned a living wage were deemed the near exclusive province of white men.

And now white people — and white working class men in particular — are suffering an identity crisis, as their perceived birthright is being taken away from them.

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White America is hurting. White America is in a panic — stirred up by know-nothing nativists like Donald Trump, the bigotry and resentment-based politics of the Republican Party, as well as the eliminationist anxieties produced by the right-wing media. I worry that, as horses in a fire, that White America will run back into the burning barn instead of running out to the freedom that awaits them should they ever try at meaningful alliances with people of color.