I Thought Being “Angry, White, and Woke” Was My Cultural Identity. It Turns Out, I Was Wrong.
This essay was published on December 25, 2025 as the first entry in my “Cripping Clover: Essays on Lucid Tinn Brains, Demedicalization of Disability, and Irish-American and Celtic Heritage” series. It was last updated on December 27, 2025.
There is a certain type of “angry, white, and woke” person that many people will recognize. It is someone who is sincerely angry at injustice in the world and becomes very quick to correct and offer feedback to other people, especially other white people. They tend to view people in binaries — actively anti-racist or not — and view it as important to not only be in the former category of people, but to also be viewed as belonging there. They also often see marginalization in this way—either someone’s identities suggest they should have the microphone or they should not, again flattening people into binaries of impacted or knowledgeable versus not.
I can describe this person because I have been them, or been adjacent to them, at many points along my journey of white racial identity formation.
I am writing this essay to share about my own white identity formation and experience decolonizing my understanding of and relationship to my ancestry and faith. More than that, I am writing to describe how I believe this “angry, white, and woke” persona can (a) turn liberation-oriented social justice spaces into hostile, cancellation-oriented environments and (b) be a spiritual attempt to separate oneself from other white people in search of a more positive white cultural identity defined by commitment to social justice. Here, I write about how a deeper solution instead lies in decolonizing one’s ancestral and faith background in an attempt to reconnect with one’s authentic cultural identity.
A major turning point for me in my journey of learning about social justice, settler colonialism, and racism was discovering how heterosexism, transphobia, gender violence, and ableism are not only linked but deeply inter-related with settler colonialism and racism. Suddenly, these topics were not only important to me because they impacted individuals and communities I cared about, but because they impacted me directly. This meant I had a personal stake in this and also knowledge to contribute.
I think this realization is extremely important for white people — that while it is important to center people who have been most deeply impacted by these systems in spaces and movements, this binary of impacted vs. not and knowledgeable vs. not is false. Most people hold both privileged and minoritized identities, and any type of minoritized experience can be an important entry-point for connecting lived experience to these systems.
I didn’t start deeply considering whiteness and racism until my late teens and early twenties. I come from a conservative and Christian background. As I started reading and listening more to people with different lived experiences from me, I became simultaneously enraged about how all this had harmed me as a queer, trans, and disabled person and about the many falsehoods white supremacy had taught me that harmed other people.
Over time, it became important to me to be a person who spoke up about social injustice and who approached all spaces with a critical lens. While those are positive aspirations, they can also be taken too far. For example, I started automatically trusting (and distrusting) certain people because of their identities. I also came to believe that if someone with a marginalized identity shared an idea, that idea must be true because of their identity. This led me to adopt a certain type of identity-based politics and advocacy, which has been discussed and criticized by other activists and writers.
Positive white identity formation is a multi-stage process, and for a long time, I understood a positive white identity to be primarily defined by being anti-racist, involved in social justice, and a vocal advocate. While I still view all of those things as positive and important, I started to recognize problems with tying my positive white identity up with what essentially amounted to both my performance on social justice issues and how other marginalized people viewed that performance. Again, I think both are important, but they can become quite problematic as identities.
I have identified four reasons why the “white, angry, and woke” persona became problematic to me when I adopted it as a positive white identity.
First, creating what essentially amounts to a cultural identity around being anti-racist, involved in social justice, and a vocal advocate creates intense internal dissonance when you are not able to perform in this way or receive feedback (accurate or not) that you have not performed this way. It turns feedback about how you are showing up for causes into a personal attack. For me, this did not look like me responding volatility. Instead, it often looked like rumination, loss of confidence, identity, and purpose, guilt, and overly seeking external validation from marginalized people. None of these effects were personally beneficial to me nor were they helpful to the work.
Second, many marginalized people connect their work on social justice to their ancestors, lineage, or community history. Social justice work was influenced by history, community, and faith that extended far beyond resistance to colonialism, racism, and other systems. I did not understand what this meant to me as a white person. While there is a lineage of white anti-racist activists and writers, this community is defined more by shared action and values than by culture and faith. In this way, I began to question if having a white cultural identity defined by being anti-racist, involved in social justice, and a vocal advocate was actually a cultural identity. This led me to start to ask and ponder more deeply: what does it mean to have a positive white identity without it being defined by contemporary action?
Third, as I moved deeper into my racial identity formation and into my social justice and anti-racism learning, I also became more conscious of the “white, angry, and woke” persona. While it may be a necessary step in identity development, I also started to recognize that remaining stuck in it can be harmful to others. Foremost, it can make social justice spaces validation-seeking and performance-oriented rather than built on sincere connection, intersectional analysis, and shared commitment, values, and actions. Additionally, it can be unnecessarily hostile to other white people who are not part of these spaces. It can result in “white, angry, and woke” white people attacking other white people for the primary purpose of distinguishing themselves from them, rather than because it is the most effective way to achieve a goal, such as changing minds, hearts, or actions. Lastly, this behavior also harmed my relationships. While there are situations where it may be necessary to cut someone off completely, doing so also prevents any opportunity of engaging with and influencing them. Taken together, I came to believe that this persona was not helping me, and it was bad for communities and oftentimes for the causes that I care about.
Lastly, as someone who has struggled with mental health challenges and addiction, I have long searched for an authentic sense of spirituality. Much of my early anti-racist journey involved disconnecting myself from Christianity and Catholicism. This, however, left a gaping spiritual, faith, and cultural hole in my life that was filled with drinking, overworking, and other types of addiction. While I saw deep truths in Indigenous knowledge and spirituality, I also was aware that these practices were not mine and that engagement with them would need to be necessarily limited. Yet no matter how hard I threw myself at a cultural identity defined by being an “angry, white, and woke” person, I did not find any spiritual relief. Instead, I often encountered spaces where belonging was conditional and which could quickly turn into hostile, cancellation-oriented environments. This practical problem in my life, in part, led me to start decolonizing my faith.
So what is an alternative to forming a positive white cultural identity around being an “angry, white, and woke” person? For me, the true and lasting alternative has been decolonizing my faith and ancestry. While I am white, and whiteness is meaningful, whiteness is also not totally real.
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Elsewhere, I describe my current understanding of my ancestry as follows:
“My family history is rooted in Irish Catholic and Scandinavian (present-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) families who settled in Minnesota and other parts of the Midwest from the mid- to late-1800s through the early 1900s. My Scandinavian ancestors on my paternal side were white settlers who received access to farmland through the Homestead Act of 1862, which transferred land that had been violently taken from Indigenous Dakota peoples in southwestern Minnesota to white settlers. My Irish Catholic ancestors on my maternal side were formerly colonized people. I also trace smaller portions of my maternal ancestry to German, English, Scottish, and French families.”
Learning more about my ancestry, which I did a lot of intentional work on around the age of 28 and 29, revealed several important insights.
First, as I was already aware, I have Irish Catholic heritage. Irish Catholics were a colonized people and, in many ways, served as an experimental site where British powers tested strategies of colonial control before applying them globally. This realization helped me see that, like people from other colonized nations, my lineage carries a history of both colonization and resistance. I could also recognize how these histories have shaped me through inter-generational trauma and inherited patterns of resilience. Once in the United States, Irish people (though legally classified as white) were not initially afforded the full social privileges of whiteness but were gradually incorporated into it, in part by aligning themselves with white supremacy. These dynamics underscore my ethical responsibility to support present-day anti-colonial struggles, such as Palestinian solidarity. They also make clear my obligation to divest from capitalism and the military industrial complex and redistribute some of the resources I have, since some of these are due to my ancestors committing these injustices.
Second, I realized that my Scandinavian heritage was geographically relevant to where I live currently: Seattle. Many Scandinavian people immigrated to the Pacific Northwest in the mid to late 1800s and early 1900s, and there is a related cultural legacy throughout the city. As I learned more about my ancestry, I also encountered the violent history of the Vikings, who raided and conquered lands, which added a new layer of complexity to how I understand my heritage. At the same time, I found Norse people had rich mythology, traditions, and culture to learn about.
Third and most importantly, my ancestry showed me that I have ancestral connections to Celtic and Old Norse religions, along with Celtic Christianity and Irish Catholicism. While I had long ago abandoned Catholicism and particularly my engagement with the Catholic Church, this showed me that many of the spiritual concepts and practices I valued from Catholicism actually originated in my ancestry (Irish Catholicism and before that Celtic religion). I began to learn about the sun and light gods Grian and Lugh and connected them to my fascination with light. I learned about the idea of “thin places,” a concept that has long defined my spirituality but which I had never had language for. I discovered that Dán (my birth name is Daniel and I went by Dan for most of my young adulthood) also had a whole deep meaning that I never knew (the word means “poem” or “unique soul-gift”).
When I first embarked upon my ancestral research, I expected to find new information or a culture I had been disconnected from. What I found instead, for the most part, was that I still had a culture, a faith, and a spirituality that I was connected to. Whiteness had just plastered names and institutions on top of it. When I removed those, a real culture was still there: Irish Catholic, Scandinavian, Celtic, Old Nordic, and more.
My prioritization of my Irish Catholic cultural identity is a choice. Just like I chose to prioritize my disabled, trans, and queer identities, communities, and history and place them at the center of who I am, I am choosing to prioritize and honor the experiences and resilience of my Irish Catholic ancestors. I don’t know their names. My knowledge and records of my ancestry are incomplete and could change at a later date. (That is a tension of any ancestry work.) However, I would argue that basing your cultural identity on a good-faith analysis of your ancestry (even if incomplete) is a far more stable source of identity than being “angry, white, and woke”.
This is ultimately where this essay ties back into the idea of being anti-racist, involved in social justice, and a vocal advocate. Doing these things remains extremely important to me, and I believe I can do them more fully by being able to speak about my ancestry. I also approach them as actions related to my identity, without them being a fragile basis for my identity.
A key idea I want to express and conclude on is that ancestry work is not about trying to prove your ancestors did not do bad things. As a white person, the overwhelming odds are that they did. White people who have lived in the U.S. for generations have contributed to settler colonization, the enslavement of African people, the genocide of Indigenous people, and countless other injustices. If you’re white, the question is to what extent did your family and what specifically did they do. While understanding direct harms by ancestors can be an important part of ancestry and reconciliation work (and I share some of that work and redistributive actions later in this essay series), I would argue that going farther back is also key. Even lineages that are primarily British have roots in cultures, mythologies, and faiths that existed before settler colonialism. Anyone can choose to acknowledge and prioritize their roots, even if you must go way back.
As an example, in my Celtic roots, I have found a deep commitment to the environment, the idea that everyone and everything is connected, non-carceral values toward harm and punishment, belief in the importance of courage and justice, a reverence for sacred places, rituals, and humanity, and a social significance for poetry, music, artisans, and other artistry. All of these are values I can authentically bring from my heritage to social justice spaces and other work, which will be far more valuable than what I was contributing by trying to be an “angry, white, and woke” person.
While I am sure my white identity will continue to evolve over time, writing this essay was important to me at this moment on a personal level. Over the last few months, I have been undergoing EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder from rape, sexual assault, witnessing the Boston Marathon bombings, and some other events. My experiences with those traumas have resulted in a lot of shame, intrusive thoughts, and guilt, and EMDR has been the first modality that has really helped me move through that. With EMDR, a therapist leads you to think about an image, you do eye movements that help the brain process, and then you talk about what comes up. At one point in therapy, I was thinking about how extreme some of the events that had occurred to me were and wondering how I had survived all of that. I realized, laughing a little, that it was largely because of my stubbornness, a quality that is well-known on my Irish Catholic side.
In that moment, I saw my ancestors.
I didn’t see their faces or hear their names, but I saw them in me.
Note: Many of the insights shared in this essay are drawn from or informed by the scholarship, activism, and lived work of other writers. I have included a reference list highlighting these writers on the cover page for the essay series.
This is the first essay in a series entitled “Cripping Clover: Essays on Lucid Tinn Brains, Demedicalization of Disability, and Irish-American and Celtic Heritage” about decolonizing my understanding of my ancestry, faith, mental health, and disabilities. The next (second) essay is: “Decolonizing and Depathologizing My Bipolar Disorder and ADHD as a ‘Lucid Tinn Brain’”.
