The third most common response, among the people designated “white,” to the radical critique of whiteness—the most common is to dismiss the whole issue or to fly to the defense of the assailed white man—is a wholesale adoption of this way of defining it: as a kind of shared sin. Because the concept of whiteness both excuses and inspires some of the worst and longest-running crimes in human history, every person we call “white” has a terrible, Faulknerian secret, which they must publicly acknowledge, describe, and lament in classes, trainings, book clubs, personal essays, and inappropriately anguished conversations with the nearest Black acquaintance. It’s as though we developed an excellent structural account of society just so that we could turn that, too, to the task of enumerating personal flaws while the boss takes notes.