J.D. Vance’s 'White Boy Christmas' and the Myth of Apologizing for Whiteness

The Vice President isn't defending “heritage” — he’s defending a rank.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He’s the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Subscribe to his Substack.

Illustration by Riley Levine

Yes, Christmas has come and gone, but here’s a belated stocking stuffer that comes with a side of dumb political grievance, the kind you unwrap and realize it’s just racism in festive paper: J.D. Vance went to Turning Point’s AmericaFest and announced that Americans “don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

That’s hilarious because nobody asked for a Hallmark apology card in the first place—this man is out here dreaming of a White Boy Christmas, the kind where every ornament is a grievance, every candy cane is a dog whistle, and Santa shows up like, “Ho ho ho, HR is coming for your identity,” while I’m over here dreaming of the kind of Christmas that actually looks like America: a loud, messy, joyful, beautifully diverse holiday table where the playlist can go from Mariah Carey to Vicente Fernández to Tems, where the food has seasoning and history, where the wrapping paper doesn’t double as a Confederate recruitment poster, and where the only thing we’re canceling is the idea that being asked to acknowledge reality counts as oppression.

To reiterate, here’s the news part: Vance closed out Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix by bragging about shoving DEI into what he called the “dustbin of history,” and then he told the crowd: “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”

And right there—right at that line—is where you can tell exactly what game he’s playing. Because nobody—literally nobody with a job, bills, and a working frontal lobe—has been standing at the gates of America demanding white folks submit a handwritten apology for the crime of having melanin levels that make sunscreen a suggestion instead of a lifestyle.

But J.D. Vance needs you to believe that’s happening, because the rest of his politics depends on it.

What J.D. Vance obviously didn’t learn in Hillbilly School is that whiteness isn’t an ethnicity—it’s a made-up rank, a political status category invented and enforced to decide who gets to be “default American” and who gets treated like a permanent guest; so when he stands up at AmericaFest and announces that Americans “don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” he’s not bravely liberating anybody from a real oppression—he’s just doing grievance theater for people who mistake “being asked to acknowledge history” for “being persecuted,” and yes, I joke about him going to Hillbilly School, but since J.D. Vance clearly did not get the memo that whiteness is a made-up category, let me give him the lesson he apparently missed—despite the fact that this man’s résumé is not exactly “raised by wolves and taught law by a raccoon.”

Because here’s the part that’s going to sting: Vance isn’t some uneducated rando who wandered into politics because he got lost on the way to the Bass Pro Shop. The official White House bio says he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, then used the GI Bill to attend The Ohio State University, and then went on to Yale Law School. That is not “Hillbilly School.” That is elite credentialing. That is “I know what I’m doing” territory.

So when a guy like that stands on a stage and tells a crowd “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” he’s not confused. He’s not lost. He’s not misinformed. He’s running a psychological con.

The trick is called DARVO—Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender—a manipulation pattern identified and explained by psychologist Jennifer Freyd. It’s a way to take a real grievance (the harm inflicted on marginalized groups), deny the underlying reality, attack the people raising it, and then flip the roles so the dominant group gets to claim victimhood. If you’ve ever watched someone get called out for causing harm and then immediately start crying about how they’re being “attacked,” congratulations: you’ve seen DARVO in the wild.

That’s what Vance is doing. He’s denying the actual history, attacking the very idea of equity, and reversing victimhood so white grievance becomes the moral center of the story. “They’re making you apologize,” he says—so you can stop listening to anyone who’s talking about what was done, what was stolen, and what was never repaired.

And let’s be crystal clear about something before the usual “WHY DO YOU HATE WHITE PEOPLE” crowd starts foaming at the mouth: no one needs J.D. Vance—or anyone else—to apologize for being white. Nobody. Not required. Not requested. Not even on backorder.

What people might want an apology for—what people might want acknowledgment for—are the things that actually happened, because America has never exactly been in the habit of apologizing for the parts of the story that made it rich and powerful: the enslavement of human beings, the legalized apartheid of Jim Crow, housing discrimination and redlining that walled off wealth and opportunity for generations, racial terrorism and mob violence that got papered over as “the past,” and the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943 Los Angeles, where U.S. servicemen and mobs targeted Mexican-American youth and investigators concluded you couldn’t even talk about the riots without acknowledging race prejudice.

But that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? Because if you acknowledge the reality of the harm, you might have to acknowledge the logic of repair. And repair is the part conservatives really don’t want to talk about—because it’s harder to demonize than DEI trainings and easier to measure than a vibe.

So Vance invents a fake demand—“apologize for being white”—and then he heroically defeats that imaginary demand in front of a cheering crowd. That’s not leadership. That’s a political magic trick where the rabbit is racism and the hat is denial.

Now, let’s get to the deeper lesson J.D. apparently missed: whiteness is not an ethnicity. White is a rank. And that’s not me being edgy. That’s American history.

Race categories are not timeless truths handed down from the heavens on stone tablets. They’re classifications humans invented, enforced, revised, and weaponized. In 1950, UNESCO literally put it bluntly: “For all practical social purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”

That’s not “woke propaganda.” That’s an international body responding to the catastrophic consequences of racial mythology. And Ashley Montagu—whose work argued against the fallacy of superior and inferior races—was part of the intellectual ecosystem pushing that understanding forward.

In the United States, “white” didn’t function like a cute cultural label. It functioned like access. Like permission. Like the difference between “citizen” and “subject.”

Congress didn’t write “German-American persons” into early citizenship laws. It didn’t say “Irish folks, Italians, and Swedes only.” It said “free white persons”. That restriction was baked into early naturalization law, and it mattered because it drew a bright line around who was allowed full membership in the project called America.

That’s why “white” is best understood as a rank—a caste-like status marker—because it was used to organize who counted, who belonged, and who got the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t about culture. It wasn’t about food. It wasn’t about folk dancing. It was about hierarchy.

Which brings us to the part that some “white pride” geniuses pretend not to understand. Nobody has a problem with people being proud of their ancestry. That’s normal. That’s human. That’s literally what culture is.

People have German festivals and nobody loses their mind. We have Oktoberfest and the streets don’t fill with commentators screaming that beer and bratwurst are “anti-Black.” Italian pride is real. Irish pride is real. People wear “Kiss me, I’m Irish” shirts on St. Patrick’s Day and the nation somehow survives the trauma of green plastic beads.

Because those are celebrations of ethnicity—which is real: shared traditions, shared histories, shared languages, shared communities. (Even APA’s style guidance draws a clear line: ethnicity is about shared cultural characteristics such as language and ancestry, not some mythical biological ranking system.)

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But “white pride” is not that. “White pride” is not “my grandmother made pierogi and my uncle plays accordion.” “White pride” is not a celebration of meaningful culture. “White pride” is a defense of rank. It’s a group saying: we like the hierarchy the way it is, and we would like to keep our place in it.

And here’s the part J.D. Vance and the “white pride” geniuses don’t want to say out loud: whiteness only works as a rank if it’s policed like “purity,” which is why—historically—whiteness magically stops being “white” the second it’s “tainted” by the wrong ancestry. That’s literally what the one-drop rule (hypodescent) was about in the U.S.: if you had any traceable Black African ancestry, the system shoved you into the lower-status category—“Black”—because the whole point was to protect white status, not celebrate culture. That’s why “white pride” is not “my grandma made pierogi and my uncle plays accordion”—it’s not a meaningful heritage festival, it’s a defense of rank, a group saying we like the hierarchy and we would like to keep our place in it. And this is where Vance’s grievance act gets especially clownish: by the old-school logic of whiteness-as-purity, he did a terrible job “protecting whiteness,” because he married Usha Vance—the daughter of Indian immigrants—and they have three kids together—so if you’re going to worship at the altar of racial “purity,” you’re supposed to treat his own family as “contamination.” Which is exactly why actual white nationalists have attacked him as a “race traitor” for marrying her. So make it make sense: MAGA wants “white pride” politics—rank politics—without admitting the rank requires this ugly purity policing, and J.D. Vance wants to sell the grievance without acknowledging that the rules he’s winking at would’ve disqualified his own household from the club.

That’s why “white pride” shows up alongside exclusionary politics. That’s why it consistently rhymes with “you’re replacing us,” “we’re being attacked,” and “this country is being taken from us.” It’s why the identity is always defined negatively—by who it’s not—and why it gets activated whenever equality starts looking less theoretical and more real.

Want a simple campus example? Walk onto almost any American university campus and you’ll find student organizations celebrating culture and community: Italian clubs, German clubs, Latinx organizations, cultural associations, and of course BSUs/BSAs that exist because Black students have historically had to build their own support and belonging inside institutions that didn’t build it for them by default.

Those organizations are encouraged because there’s nothing inherently supremacist about students gathering around culture, mentorship, language, food, and shared experience. It’s community.

And notice what you typically don’t see as an innocent cultural club: “white” as a stand-alone identity group that’s just there to celebrate the joys of… what, exactly? Unseasoned chicken? Colonizer-core Pinterest boards? The cultural tradition of telling everybody “I don’t see color” while clutching your purse?

That’s the tell: whiteness isn’t a culture. It’s a rank. And people defend it because it comes with benefits—material and psychological—whether they admit it or not.

So when J.D. Vance says “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” he’s not defending a heritage. He’s defending the idea that the rank should remain unquestioned. He’s taking a status category—historically tied to access, safety, credibility, property, and citizenship—and recasting it as if it’s an oppressed identity group being bullied by HR trainings.

That’s DARVO. Every time.

Now let’s pivot to Blackness, because this is where the bad-faith crowd loves to play dumb. Yes, you could argue that race categories are socially constructed—including “Black.” But here’s a glaring difference that matters: in the United States, “Black” as a racial label generally refers to people with origins in the Black racial groups of Africa. That’s not my personal definition; that’s the standard used in official classification by the U.S. Census Bureau.

And within that umbrella you have real diversity: African Americans (many of whom are descendants of enslaved people in the U.S.), Black immigrants from African nations, and Afro-Caribbean communities. Those are real histories and real cultures, sometimes overlapping, sometimes tense, sometimes bonded by shared experience, sometimes separated by different migrations and different relationships to American racism. Pew’s research captures that complexity.

In other words: “Black” in America has a relationship to ancestry, yes—but it’s also a political identity forged under pressure. A culture built inside the cage of racial hierarchy. When your lineage has been disrupted by slavery—names stripped, records destroyed, languages suppressed—identity is not just geography. It’s survival. It’s memory. It’s improvisation. It’s turning what was done to you into something you can still call yours.

That’s why some people embrace the term African American, while others prefer Black, and others identify simply as African in the context of Pan-African politics or immigrant identity. And it’s also why some Black Americans feel complicated ties to the African continent—not because Africa isn’t the origin point of ancestry, but because the transatlantic slave trade severed traceable connections, and American racism forged a distinct cultural identity that is both African in origin and uniquely American in development.

That’s not “division.” That’s history.

Which brings us back to J.D. Vance, standing in Phoenix like he’s the patron saint of white emotional fragility, telling people they don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.

Again: nobody asked.

What people have asked—what people have demanded, for generations—is that America stop pretending the harm was “a long time ago” while the benefits are still cashing interest checks in the present. And that’s where redlining matters. Redlining wasn’t just some interpersonal prejudice where a banker said something rude. It was structural: neighborhoods coded as risk based on race, investment withdrawn, mortgages denied, wealth blocked. The University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project explains how entire neighborhoods were categorized and cut off.

And when that becomes the architecture of opportunity, you don’t fix it by telling people to stop “making you apologize.” You fix it by confronting it and repairing it.

That’s why the reparations conversation exists. Not as a guilt ritual. Not as a woke TikTok trend. As a policy question: if a government sanctioned exploitation and then sanctioned exclusion after “emancipation,” what does repair look like?

Congress has had a bill for decades—H.R. 40, the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.” That’s study, not a cash drop. And even that basic conversation gets treated like a national emergency by the same people who think DEI seminars are tyranny.

The NAACP has long supported reparations for descendants of slavery and the Jim Crow era, again framing it as repair for specific historical harms—not as a demand for white people to grovel on cue.

So when Vance acts like the big problem in America is that white people are being pressured to apologize for existing, he’s not just being ridiculous. He’s running interference. He’s trying to make the conversation itself sound insane, so nobody ever gets to the part where you discuss whether repair is rational.

And that’s why I’m not buying the “aw shucks, he’s just talking about individualism” defense.

Because the same speech where he played victim for white people is also the one where he refused to draw meaningful red lines against bigotry inside the movement—rejecting “purity tests,” even as the right publicly feuded about whether to exclude overt bigots and antisemitic figures.

That’s the part that tells you exactly what time it is.

It’s not just that Vance is saying a dumb line. It’s the way he’s building a political coalition where grievance is sacred and accountability is optional. Where the “movement should be open to everyone” somehow includes the people preserving “white Christian identity,” but always requires the rest of the country to shut up about the history that created the rank in the first place.

So, J.D. Vance: nobody needs you—or MAGA—to apologize for being white.

If you want to apologize for something, try apologizing for being a duplicitous snake in the grass who sells grievance to people like it’s a Christmas ham.

Try apologizing for normalizing the idea that equity is oppression and that civil rights enforcement is discrimination.

Try apologizing for what your movement did to basic democratic trust by treating elections like reality TV finales where the only acceptable ending is “we win,” and if you lose it must be fraud, sabotage, or demons in the voting machines.

Try apologizing for the way MAGA flirted with political violence and then pretended it was all “tourists” and “concerned patriots” when the nation watched people assault police officers and try to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Try apologizing for the way your movement wants the power of the state to be massive when it’s used against the right targets—protesters, immigrants, teachers, librarians, women, LGBTQ folks—but suddenly becomes a sacred threat when anyone suggests it should protect the people it has historically harmed.

Try apologizing for building a politics that treats history like a personal insult and truth like an attack.

Because the only reason you can stand on a stage and say “you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore” is because you’re relying on a very American habit: pretending the rank is natural, and the consequences are imaginary.

But the rank was built. The rank was enforced. The rank was written into law. And the “apology” you’re complaining about is mostly just people refusing to lie for your comfort.

So no, J.D. Nobody needs you to apologize for being white.

What we need is for you—and the entire grievance-industrial complex you’re feeding—to stop confusing accountability with persecution, stop confusing rank with heritage, and stop using DARVO like it’s a campaign platform.

Because if your big political message is “white people, you’re the real victims,” then it’s not that you didn’t get the memo.

It’s that you got it, read it, understood it … and decided the con was worth it anyway.