Consider that some people think that they "just don't see race", or that poverty doesn't exist in their community, or that Indigenous people aren't part of their national consciousness. One way to understand what is at play here is through imagining a kind of benign ignorance—people just haven't been taught the facts of the situation, and so they can't be held responsible for not understanding how race, poverty, indigeneity, and more, are present in their lives. If this were the problem, just giving people more and better information would correct their knowledge problem. But we don't just have a knowledge problem—we have a habit-of-being problem; the problem of whiteness is a problem of what we expect, our ways of being, bodily-ness, and how we understand ourselves as "placed" in time. Whiteness is a problem of being shaped to think that other people are the problem. Another way to understand this dynamic is to realize the very complex entanglement of practices and habit of ignorance, repression, and active disavowal that constitute an active settler process of not telling, not seeing, and not understanding the truth of the matter, which is a truth of being shaped as the legacy of the harms of the past.

— Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell (Page 38)