White people do not understand PoC’s existential angst.

Existential angst is portrayed and experienced as individual suffering. In white-majority countries, white people tend to think of other whites as individuals with individual identities, but they tend to think of people of colour as a collective with a collective identity. Thus, white people from white-majority countries tend to think that people of colour cannot experience existential angst.

However, the problem is that people of colour think of ourselves as individuals with individual identities. (Or at least I do, and I assume that other people of colour do too until proven otherwise, because I consciously reject stereotypical assumptions of questionable origin, not because I actually have access to the minds of other people of colour.) Individuals of colour can experience existential angst, and in addition, our consciousness of ourselves as individuals regularly clashes with our consciousness of how society views us as a collective.

Racist white man attacked Asian Canadians with pickup truck.

Ontario man jailed for attack on Asian anglers (CBC News):

[A white] Ontario man has been sentenced to two years less a day in jail Friday for attacking a group of Asian anglers and their friends in 2007.

Justice Alfred Stong also sentenced Trevor Middleton, 23, to three years’ probation after he has served his sentence, and 240 hours of community service helping seniors and people with mental disabilities. Middleton will also be required to attend a cultural awareness course, and he’s been banned from driving for 10 years.

According to Justice Stong, since some of the victims were Asian Canadians, what made them stand out visually in the overwhelmingly white town must have been their “culture”, which was made conspicuous by the fact that they were trying to fish from a dock in Lake Simcoe, Ontario, alongside their white friends.

White, male startup companies get funding for being white and male.

When top technology venture capitalist John Doerr decides which startup company to invest in, he consciously and deliberately chooses white males over women and racial minorities:

“That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in — which was true of Google — it was very easy to decide to invest.”

Haiti was the first black country to get its independence.

“Immigrant” Def Poetry by Wyclef Jean (2005):

White people’s family roots are deeper than those of ethnic minorities.

Another example of white privilege and othering is when white people assume that racialized people have deeper roots and stronger family ties than white people. The othering is based on the notion that “non-white” people are foreign people, and that “non-white” people have a stronger ethnic identity because we are more homogeneous and monolithic in ways of thought. White privilege allows white people to ignore the ways in which a white-majority society encourages only white families to lay down their roots and blossom, while historically, it enacted laws to extinguish and suppress “non-white” and racialized families.

White Americans envy African Americans for having “roots” in “Africa”, while ignoring the fact that Africa is a heterogeneous continent (like Europe), and that most African Americans cannot trace their African ancestry precisely because of white racism and slavery. It is no accident that African Americans are more likely to find documents attesting to the existence of their white ancestors. White Americans whose ancestors have been in the United States for multiple generations are the ones with the deepest roots, the ones whose histories were allowed to be recorded, the ones who own property passed down from generations, when all this was denied to non-white people.