Selective Empathy and the Stories Whiteness Tells Itself

White America’s sudden fixation on Nazi Germany whenever state violence becomes visible is revealing.

When ICE raids intensified under Trump, many white Americans reached immediately for comparisons to 1930s Germany. They didn’t reach for enslavement. They didn’t reach for the Ku Klux Klan. They didn’t reach for Jim Crow. They didn’t reach for Native removal or Japanese internment.

State violence through time and space

Those histories are inconvenient because they require an admission that American violence wasn’t an aberration. It was foundational. It was legal. It was defended by courts, churches, and neighbors who believed themselves decent.

Nazi Germany, by contrast, allows distance. It was foreign. It was evil elsewhere. It harmed people who could be imagined as innocent, European, and undeserving of state brutality. That’s where empathy finally activates.

This pattern isn’t new. Whiteness has historically tolerated extraordinary levels of violence so long as it was directed outward, downward, or away from itself. When Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities were targeted, the dominant response was silence or justification. Law and order. Property rights. Stability.

Only when state violence begins to touch whiteness does outrage emerge, often framed as shock. How could this happen here? History answers that question easily. It happened here repeatedly. It simply wasn’t considered a crisis before.

This matters because democracies don’t collapse when the first group is targeted. They collapse when the majority decides comfort is more important than solidarity. By the time empathy broadens, the machinery is already in place.

Recognizing this isn’t about despair. It’s about refusing to let selective memory determine our response to power.

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-Smart Brown Girl