White Men and the Lament We Avoid
A co-authored essay by Jess Bielman and Ryan Seidlitz
A few years ago, I shared an office with a colleague who is a Black woman. One morning, after a particularly heavy news cycle, she walked in and asked me a question that I did not know how to hear.
“Why don’t white people feel collective shame when someone in your demographic does something heinous in the news?” I did not even understand the question at first.
She explained that when something happened involving a prominent Black athlete or public figure, she felt it. Not because she agreed. Not because she defended it. But because she felt a sense of collective connection. A sense that whatever that person had done would ripple outward and touch the way Black people would be perceived. She described it as collective shame. Not chosen. Not logical. But real.
I remember thinking that this was so far from my lived experience that it almost felt abstract. When a white man commits violence, fraud, abuse, or public disgrace, I have never instinctively felt that it reflected on me. I have never felt required to answer for him. I have never felt the weight of collective identity in that way.
That was the gap she was naming. Over time, though, something shifted. I began to notice patterns. When another school shooting hits the news, I lament the tragedy. And somewhere beneath the grief is the quiet, dreadful assumption that it will likely be a white man.
When new revelations emerge from the Epstein files of powerful men exploiting vulnerable people, I lament the victims. And I also lament that the faces behind the power structures look hauntingly familiar.
When conversations surface about mass incarceration, poverty, or systems that disproportionately harm communities of color, I lament the policies. And I cannot ignore who largely designed, funded, protected, and benefited from those systems.
I lament that sometimes white men entitlement masquerades as freedom.
I lament that sometimes white men fragility erupts as outrage.
I lament that sometimes white men have an inability to distinguish between losing dominance and losing dignity.
I lament the way some white men have turned anger into a media strategy.
I lament the discipleship of grievance.
I lament that so much of what passes for “strength” is a refusal to self-examine.
And I lament that when conversations about this begin, the first instinct for many of us is defense.
It is important to say this clearly: not all white men are violent. Not all white men exploit power. Not all white men build unjust systems. My coworker’s point was not that every white person is personally responsible for every harm.
Her point was about identification. Some communities are formed into collective awareness because survival has required it. Others are shaped into individual insulation because dominance has allowed it. I lament we are the latter. And that insulation comes at a cost.
According to Soong-Chan Rah in Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, lament is refusing denial but is a telling the truth about pain, injustice, and brokenness, and is both personal and communal. It does not rush to resolution but allows grief to be fully expressed. Rah argues that lament is not optional but a central language of faith. Unlike guilt, which can be overly self-centered on the judgment that something you’ve done is wrong, and my personal feelings of remorse. Guilt often is personal (“I feel bad”), while lament is corporate and prophetic (“We grieve what has happened and cry out for justice”). In contrast to guilt, lament is outward-facing and relational. Lament leads to solidarity with those who suffer and refuses to move on too quickly. Prophetic lament in Rah’s view is not purely private but communal and social, and leads somewhere. Guilt may relieve the conscience, while lament is real, raw, and authentic and transforms community.
Rah writes, “there is power in bringing untold stories to light” and later states, “the story of suffering is often swept under the rug in order not to create discomfort or bad feelings. Lament is denied because the dead body in front of us is being denied.” Collective lament and communal grief must be pursued and practiced as a discipline for restoration. Collective lament has nothing to do with shaming a member of the community and continuing the “illusion of separateness” and detaching oneself from the broader story, but instead is primarily concerned with solidarity, acknowledging real suffering, refusing simple and superficial answers, and leading toward transformation.
Psychotherapist Francis Weller author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes, “Welcoming our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open and freeing us to once more feed our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world. Grief keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others.”
Clarify that collective lament is not about shaming every individual member of a demographic. It is about refusing to detach oneself from the broader story that has formed us and benefited us.
Back in that office, I realized that my coworker was not accusing me. She was inviting me into a different way of being. White men are not uniquely evil. But we are uniquely positioned within American history. We have been granted disproportionate authorship of the systems we now inhabit. That authorship includes both beauty and brutality.
To refuse lament is to refuse authorship. And perhaps the deeper tragedy is not only the harm itself, but our inability to grieve it together. There is a temptation in conversations like this to rush toward reassurance. To say, “But I didn’t do that.” Or “I’m not like those men.” Or “Why should I feel shame for something I didn’t personally cause?”
Those questions matter. They deserve careful handling. But they cannot be the first move.
The first move is to just breathe and let lament happen. Not self-hatred. Not performative guilt. Not endless apology. Lament is not an admission of personal villainy. It is an acknowledgment of shared humanity. And shared humanity is where healing begins.