A Request to White America
A Request to White America
A direct address, in the voices of three young American men who are no longer here to make it themselves.
I want to begin by naming three young American men who should still be alive.
Dustin Wolfswinkel died at nineteen, in a car, in Laguna Beach, on January 31, 1988. He was the blond, blue-eyed son of the richest man in Arizona, and at thirteen he beat a boy in PE class for using a word against me that this country had not yet finished deciding whether I was protected from. He did not wait for a teacher. He did not need to be taught what was wrong. He saw it, and he chose.
Pat Tillman died at twenty-seven, in the mountains of Afghanistan, on April 22, 2004. I knew him before the legend. I sat with him at Arizona State and had the same conversations with him I had with every athlete I ever sat with - about race, about the country, about what a man with a platform could do with it that was different from what the platform expected of him. Pat took those conversations seriously. He took his own life seriously. He made choices that cost him money and comfort because he believed a man is supposed to.
John F. Kennedy Jr. died at thirty-eight, in the ocean off Martha’s Vineyard, on July 16, 1999. He was the child of a family this country had already asked too much of, and he was, by every account of the people who worked with him, becoming the kind of public man his father and uncle had tried to become before the country killed them for it. He was already building a magazine that took politics seriously as a matter of public life rather than as a sport. By every credible account, he was on his way into politics himself. The country lost the man he was about to be.
Three young American men. Three different decades. Three different kinds of promise. And all three of them gone before they could become the thing this country most needs right now and does not have enough of - grown American men, standing in public, using what they were given to defend the people this country was built to extract from.
I am writing to the ones who are still here.
A note on the title of this piece
I want to address the title before I go any further, because if I do not address it the rest of the piece will not land the way it should.
This piece is called A Request to White America. It should not be called that. The work I am asking for is not white America’s work to do alone. It is American work. It is the work of every person in this country who has the means, the platform, the standing, the conscience, or the simple breath in their lungs to do it. The country I am trying to help build does not separate Americans into the ones who get asked and the ones who do not.
And yet I am writing to white America specifically, and I am calling the piece what I am calling it, because the country I live in right now is not yet the country I am trying to build. In the country I live in right now, the silence of white Americans with standing is what the machine of extraction is currently running on. Their voices are the ones being counted on to stay quiet. Their permission is the permission the institutions are looking for before they continue. That is the load-bearing fact of this moment, and a piece that pretends it is otherwise is a piece that lets the moment off the hook.
So the title stands. But I want every reader of this piece to understand that I am writing it under protest. I should not have to write a request to one part of the country. I should be able to write a request to the country itself, and have the country answer.
Dustin and Pat are the proof that this could be a general American request. Two young white men, raised inside the houses they were raised inside, both of them chose differently than they were expected to choose. They did not wait for the rest of white America to come around. They did not need the address of this piece written to them. They were already past it. They were Americans first, and they acted accordingly, and they paid for it in different ways and at different times and in the end they paid for it with their lives.
If more white Americans had chosen what they chose, this piece would not need to exist. It would have already been written, by all of us together, a long time ago. The fact that it still needs to be written, and that it still needs to be addressed where it is being addressed, is the measurement of how much of the work is still left.
Read the rest of this piece with that understood. The address is a description of where we are. It is not a description of where I want us to go.
What I am asking you for
I am not writing to summon you. A summons is what a court does. A summons is what a government does. I am writing to ask you.
I am asking you to honor decency. I am asking you to honor a humanity that recognizes all of us holistically - not in pieces, not conditionally, not after we have proven we deserve to be recognized, but as whole people who were here from the beginning and belong here the same as you.
That is the request. Everything else in this piece is the reason I am making it, and the shape of what it could look like if you said yes.
The house and the son
Three times, Conley Wolfswinkel’s security threw my friend and me out of his house. His son Dustin had invited us. It was Dustin’s home. But the men his father paid to keep the house the way his father wanted it kept decided we did not belong, and they acted on that decision three separate times.
Dustin was furious every single time.
That is the quiet American story nobody tells often enough. A house was run a certain way by the father. The son grew up inside the house, saw the rules, and decided the rules were wrong. The son did not wait for the father to change. The son did not wait for the culture to catch up. The son chose differently inside the house he had been born into, and he kept choosing differently until the day he died.
That is the story I am asking white America to step into right now, and the story I am asking the rest of the country to recognize as the American story it actually is, available to anyone who is willing to choose it.
You were born into a house. The house has rules. Some of those rules are good, and some of those rules were written to extract from the people who built the house and never got to live in it. You did not write the rules. You are not guilty for being born where you were born. But you are in the house. And the rules are being enforced right now by people who are counting on you to stay quiet.
Dustin did not stay quiet. He was thirteen.
Pat, and the conversations we actually had
I want to be careful here. Pat Tillman’s name has become something the country uses, and his family has carried the cost of that use for more than twenty years. I am not going to use him. I am going to tell you what I actually know, because I was actually there, and then I am going to let the rest alone.
I sat with Pat on multiple occasions. I challenged him the same way I challenged every friend I had who played at the professional level and every athlete I met in the years I moved through those circles. The challenge was always the same. You have a platform. The platform is worth more than the game. What are you going to do with it that the platform does not expect of you?
Pat did not flinch from that conversation. He engaged it. He pushed back where he disagreed. He listened where he was uncertain. He was not performing a conversation. He was having one. And when he made the decisions he made with his life, he made them the way a person makes decisions - not the way a brand makes decisions.
That is all I am going to say about him here, because it is enough.
What I want you to hear is this. There are men like Pat alive in this country right now. Men who were raised the way he was raised, who were given what he was given, who have the platforms and the bodies and the public standing and the private conscience that he had. They are hamstrung by convention. They are hamstrung by contracts, by institutional practice, by the quiet understanding that a man in their position is not supposed to speak too directly about what is happening to the country.
I am asking them to speak anyway. I am asking them to look at what Pat did with a fraction of the years he should have had, and to decide whether convention is really what they want to be protected by when the question finally comes back around to what they did.
Pat did not need this piece written to him. Pat was already past the address. He was an American doing American work, by the only definition of American work that ought to matter. The men I am asking now are the men who are still inside the address — still operating as if the country is divided into the ones who get asked and the ones who do not. I am asking them to be Americans the way Pat was an American, and to render the address of this piece obsolete by the way they live.
John, and what we do not have
John Kennedy was thirty-eight years old when the plane went into the water. He was already building a magazine that took politics seriously as a matter of public life rather than as a sport. He was already quietly deciding which of the family obligations he was going to accept and which he was going to modernize. The people who worked with him said, again and again, that he was becoming.
He did not get to become.
There is a hole in American public life where he would have been, and where his father would have been, and where his uncle would have been, and where, if I am being honest, where my friend Dustin would have been and where Pat would have been. There is a generation of American men this country keeps losing before they finish the work they were on their way to doing.
I am not asking the men who are still here to replace them. Nobody replaces them. I am asking the men who are still here to stop waiting to be given permission to be the kind of public person those four would have been. The permission is not coming. The moment is already here.
What the moment actually is
I want to be plain about what is happening, because the piece does not work if the stakes are left vague.
The current presidential administration is operating as an extraction conveyance. That is the clearest language I can find for it. Law is being ignored. Treaties are being ignored. Precedent is being ignored. Federal data infrastructure is being dismantled in real time so that the harm being done cannot be measured by the people it is being done to. Wealth is being moved upward at a speed this country has not seen in any of our lifetimes, and the moral argument for why is not being made because there is no moral argument to make. The argument is that they can, and no one is stopping them.
This is not a political disagreement. A political disagreement is about how fast to go, or how much to spend, or which program to prioritize. This is about whether the country is going to remain a country that operates on the consent of the governed, or whether it is going to become something else. The legal clarity of this moment is not ambiguous. The moral clarity of this moment is not ambiguous. What is ambiguous is whether enough of the people who could say so out loud are going to say so out loud.
The people I am writing to: white Americans with standing, with platforms, with capital, with credentials, with the benefit of every doubt this country has ever given anyone, are the people whose silence is currently being counted on. Your silence is load-bearing. The machine cannot run without it.
I am asking you to take your silence off the load.
What I have built for you and yours, and what I am asking you to step into
Seven Years of Change is a civic-economic platform. Three pillars: nutrition, housing, transportation - built on a deeper architecture of community finance, barter, a public ledger that names extraction for what it is, and a cap of ten percent on interest, because anything above that is not the cost of lending. It is extraction. We said so. We wrote it down. We are building the thing.
The platform is designed for people aged fourteen to thirty-three, because that is the generation being handed the bill for what is happening right now, and because that is the generation still young enough to build something different before the habit of not-building hardens into permanence. The four-phase arc is stabilize, earn, build, lead. In plain language: get stable, earn a living, build something of your own, lead the next person through the same door.
I am not asking white America to lead this. This is not yours to lead. I am asking you to participate in it, to fund it, to protect it with your name and your standing and your public voice, to send your children toward it, to use the platforms you already have to point at it and say this is real and I am with it.
I am asking the athletes to use their NIL earnings and their foundation capacity to route real money into the communities they came from or the communities that cheer for them, through structures that are accountable and durable rather than photogenic and temporary.
I am asking the inheritors to look at the houses they were born into - the Wolfswinkel house, the Kennedy house, and a thousand houses like them in every state, and to decide, the way Dustin decided, that the rules of the house are not going to be the rules of your life.
I am asking the executives and the professionals and the credentialed people to stop waiting for permission from institutions that will never give it. Permission is not coming. The institutions are the thing being captured. You are going to have to move without them.
I am asking the quiet ones - the ones who know, the ones who have known for a long time, the ones who have stayed quiet because it was easier - to stop being quiet. Not loudly. Not performatively. Just honestly, in the rooms you are already in, with the people who are already listening to you.
Why I can ask
I am the child of Arizona’s first legally married Black and White couple after the Supreme Court said they could be. My father is from Youngstown, Ohio. His father served in the Marine Corps in the Pacific in the Second World War. That side of my family came from Italy and decided this country was going to be theirs, and they earned it the way the country asked them to earn it. My mother’s line traces back to a man who was enslaved in North Carolina, freed after the Civil War, and moved to Texas through a program that recruited freed people to work fields that had just stopped being worked by people who were not allowed to leave them.
My parents are alive and they are well. They have earned the right to see this country changed in massively positive ways for the people without means that they have spent their lives standing alongside. That is part of why I am writing this now, in this state of mind, on this day. The years are not infinite. The window in which the people who raised us get to see us finish what they started is not infinite.
I served in the 82nd Airborne. I worked on the John McCain campaign. I carried a letter of recommendation from Barry Goldwater. I ran a conservative-funded anti-gang nonprofit with a Tuskegee Airman as a sponsor. I was part of the 1992 Los Angeles truce efforts through Jim Brown’s Amer-I-Can program. I have taught for more than fifteen years — in Phoenix specifically, and in California. I have sat on both sides of every table this country sets. I am not writing from outside the house. I am writing from inside it.
That is why I can ask. That is why I am asking.
The Request
Dustin was thirteen when he chose. He did not get to see forty. Pat was twenty-seven when the mountain took him. He did not get to see the man he was going to become. John was thirty-eight when the water took him. He did not get to become his generation’s version of what his family kept trying to be.
You are still here.
You were raised in a country whose worst instincts are currently being enforced by the people holding its offices, and whose best instincts are being carried by people who do not have offices, who do not have capital, who do not have the benefit of any doubt, and who are building anyway. The question the next decade is going to ask you is not whether you agreed. The question is going to be what you did.
I am asking you to do something.
I am asking you to honor the country the three of them thought they were living in, and to help the rest of us build the one they did not live to see.
That is the request.
And one last thing, before I close. I want this piece to be the last one of its kind I ever have to write. I want the next version of this country to be a country where a piece like this is not addressed to one part of the country, because the country itself answers when the country itself is asked. Dustin and Pat were already living in that country. They did not need to be addressed. They acted as if the country was the country it was supposed to be, and they paid the price of acting that way ahead of the rest of us.
If you say yes to what I am asking, the country starts becoming the country they thought they were living in. The address of the next piece does not need to be A Request to White America. The address of the next piece is just America, asking America, the way it was always supposed to be.
That is what I have outlined. That is what I am asking you to build with me.
Sí Se Puede.