Daily Inspiration Quote by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

It’s a deliberately destabilizing line: not “some white men,” not “many,” but “every,” with “raised” doing the real work. Dunbar-Ortiz isn’t describing individual prejudice so much as manufacturing conditions - a childhood curriculum, formal and informal, that teaches entitlement as normal. “False sense of power” is a surgical phrase because it concedes the feeling while denying the legitimacy: the confidence is real, the foundation is not. That inversion is the point. It reframes whiteness from an identity into a social training program, one that persuades ordinary people they are naturally meant to steer institutions, define belonging, and expect deference.

The subtext is not a moral scold; it’s a warning about fragility. If power is experienced as birthright, any move toward equity reads as theft. The quote anticipates the predictable backlash to civil rights, Indigenous sovereignty, immigration, feminism, labor - the recurring panic that “the country is being taken away.” Dunbar-Ortiz, known for foregrounding settler colonialism in U.S. history, is also smuggling in a historical claim: white power wasn’t earned through merit but built through dispossession, law, and violence, then laundered into common sense through schools, media, and national myth.

As intent, it’s a provocation aimed at white listeners: stop treating your comfort as neutral, your access as personal virtue, your authority as natural. The line works because it turns the spotlight from overt bigots to the baseline expectations many never have to name - and suggests that the real crisis isn’t losing power, it’s discovering you never morally owned it.