White Grievance Is Not Oppression

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JD Vance, the Myth of the Forced Apology, and the Politics of Fragile Power

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By Dr. Kofi Obasi

JD Vance stands on a stage, puffed up with the cheap courage of a protected man, and declares that white people no longer have to apologize for being white as if such an apology were ever demanded, institutionalized, or enforced in the first place. This is not ignorance. This is theater. And like most bad theater, it relies on a lie so loud it hopes to drown out history.

Let us be precise, because precision is the enemy of propaganda.

No law. No policy. No social contract in the United States has ever required white people to apologize for being white. What has been required occasionally, reluctantly, and usually only after blood and pressure — is that this nation acknowledge the material advantages built on stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen lives. Accountability is not an apology. Truth-telling is not humiliation. And honesty is not oppression.

What Vance is doing is a classic dog whistle, tuned to the frequency of grievance politics. He reframes accountability as injury, privilege as persecution, and criticism as cruelty. This is how power protects itself when it no longer wants to justify its inheritance. “They’re making you feel bad,” he implies — so you never ask who has been made disposable.

Bernice King, standing in the moral lineage of a man America still quotes but refuses to obey, dismantled this farce with surgical clarity. In 62 years, she has never seen white people forced to apologize for being white. What she has seen is America contort itself to avoid reckoning with why whiteness has functioned as a default advantage economically, politically, and socially. Her words terrify people like Vance because they are calm, factual, and immune to outrage-bait.

And let’s talk about patterns, not isolated remarks.

This is the same JD Vance who felt comfortable reducing Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a sitting federal lawmaker to a sexist, racialized caricature. “Street girl.” That phrase is not accidental. It is a dog whistle wrapped in misogyny, dipped in racism, and delivered with a smirk. When policy fails, degradation steps in. When ideas run dry, insults do the heavy lifting.

Notice the choreography: immigrants are demonized, Black women are disrespected, history is rewritten, and white grievance is centered as the nation’s most urgent emergency. This is not leadership. It is panic management for a base terrified of losing cultural dominance and desperate to be told they are victims rather than beneficiaries.

And no — pointing out white privilege does not deny the existence of poor white people. That argument is the intellectual equivalent of screaming “all lives matter” at a funeral. Class struggle exists alongside racial hierarchy, not instead of it. Both can be true. Only bad-faith actors pretend otherwise.

So when Vance says white people don’t have to apologize anymore, what he’s really offering is permission: permission to stop listening, permission to stop learning, permission to treat empathy as weakness and history as optional. It is an absolution offered by a man who has no authority to grant it.

America does not need fewer apologies. It needs more honesty.

It does not need wounded egos coddled. It needs structural repair.

And it does not need leaders who confuse their discomfort with oppression.

If your identity requires denial to survive, the problem is not the conversation — it’s the foundation.

Dr. Kofi Obasi

Scholar of power, history, and the lies empires tell themselves