My mum tells me a story about my grandpa, who was a white cop on the beat in 60s Birmingham, Alabama. He comes home from work, blood soaking through his white button down. He’s just slashed the face of a black man. He’s cackling with laughter. ‘He was of a different time’ mum says.

My dad tells me about my other grandfather, the Nazi. All my life I was told that he wasn’t a ‘real’ Nazi, just a pawn in a tragic war. And anyway, he was taken as a POW by the Americans, didn’t even pull a trigger, knew English, probably gave the Americans Nazi secrets — likely a hero. Dad tells me now that his father was a Holocaust denier, that we don’t really know for sure what he got up to during the war, because he never spoke about it.

My second cousin writes something on her Facebook wall about God blessing the state of Wisconsin. Her feed is a raging rapid of memes, one comparing Hillary Clinton to Bill Cosby, another suggesting Trump is a messiah sent to Earth to ‘cleanse’ us. My mum frowns. Near all of our American relatives from the ‘great rust belt’ voted for Trump. ‘I feel so humiliated’, she openly weeps.

My whiteness pulses, bleeds, congeals on wounds in time. An ancestor of mine slaughtered Native Americans — or, more likely, a great number of my ancestors did. I don’t know for sure, because we never talk about it. My white family won’t talk about it. We fixate on the Native American blood that courses through our veins. We commiserate for my grandmother, unable to attend university in Prague for being part Jewish. We seek out our ancestral trauma with morbid wonder. We ignore the more divisive aspects — the white aspects of our own family’s legacy.

Personally, I think about it constantly. I’m teased by a number of friends throughout my life as the ‘whitest person’ they know. I wonder what it is about me that makes me so white. I hope it isn’t the way I dress.

When I’m 11, a black woman at a fast food stand in Birmingham won’t let me buy a coke because I’m holding ‘white people money’. She laughs. I don’t understand. The manager rolls her eyes, takes my money and tells me to scoot.

I’m 13 and Eminem’s Slim Shady EP becomes my gateway drug into rap music. I start listening to Wu Tang Clan. I start writing raps about how hard it is to be a fat teenage girl. I perform them in front of a mirror. I look like a fucking idiot.

I’m 15 and my great aunt points to a beautiful white plantation style home. ‘Blacks live there now’ she says. She makes a face like she’s going to spit, but drives on.

It takes until I’m 28 for the term ‘privilege’ to catch my eye. My instinct is to reject fashionable terminology as inert time capsules that will wither with the attention spans of the marketplace they were born for — the word ‘metrosexual’ comes to mind. But the word ‘privilege’ sits on my chest like a fat bear, and rages when I attempt to wriggle away.

I think to be white is to furiously ignore our own privilege while simultaneously condemning it. We lament Trump from our ivory towers stacked with sushi and the latest edition of The Guardian. We argue for the rights of refugees within our carefully manicured local parks. We have people of colour as friends, as family, as loved ones, as colleagues and we look to Hollywood films to understand the POC experience.

We attempt to rise above our whiteness, but there is literally nowhere to go. There is no glass ceiling, no shackles, no cage containing us — our ancestors ensured that we would never need to fight for our right to exist in this world with their unprecedented savagery, with rape, torture, murder, with the establishment of power structures that value whiteness in any and all forms, with education that fiercely defends western ingenuity while ignoring the theft of cultures, with media that refers to POC as ‘minorities’, and with people, ordinary people, who refuse to confront their own whiteness and instead look to others for moral and tangible culpability.

Why was Trump elected? A great number of reasons, most of which point to a culture of white people who have inflicted a great deal of trauma on the world — who are still inflicting trauma on the world — and have yet to acknowledge that their existence, that our existence, demands considerable reparations.

It’s a conversation that is as old as colonialism itself, led by people of colour, and often ignored by us. I spring from Europe and America, but I grew up in Australia, a country which has actively and successfully suppressed reconciliation with its Indigenous population. A country where the question of whether or not white people should be held accountable for their benefactors has been stopped by the word ‘sorry’ the same way a protester might be stopped by a gun.

Democracy is designed to harness conflict, to spurn division, to amplify the distinct and oppositional traumas experienced by the varied cultures within it. It demands that we fight. I personally am tired of fighting the people I love. But raising a white flag — mind the pun — is simply not good enough. Not for me. Not anymore.