The Postal Code of Violence: How Safety is Defined by Whiteness

We often talk about safety as a universal human right, a baseline expectation for a dignified life. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to acknowledge that safety is not a universal experience. It is a privilege, meticulously guarded and unevenly distributed along the lines of race, geography, and power.

I was recently watching a video from Nadir Nahdi, who is visiting the Gulf region. With the war in the region, he noted how people outside the area keep asking him, with palpable concern, “Are you safe?”

The question seemed simple, but it sparked a much deeper realization.

He described being in a space and overhearing a conversation between a British person and an American person. They were discussing how unsafe they felt in the Gulf region, how shaken they were, how traumatized they felt just being in proximity to the broader regional conflict. Their distress was palpable, and they felt entitled to express it.

Sitting with them was a Palestinian woman. And as she listened to these two Westerners process their fear and discomfort, all she could do was sit in silence. She had just spent the last two and a half years watching her people be genocided. Her family, her community, her history, being erased in real-time. And yet, here were two people who had flown in from thousands of miles away, occupying the emotional space, centering their own temporary discomfort, completely unaware of the woman beside them for whom this was not a feeling of unsafety, but the reality of annihilation.

That moment crystallized everything. It revealed the unspoken hierarchy of whose suffering counts.

The question “Are you safe?” wasn’t just about physical danger. It forced him—and us—to ask a deeper question: Who deserves to be safe?

The British and American tourists felt entitled to safety, and entitled to be traumatized when that sense of safety was disturbed. Their discomfort was the center of the conversation. But the Palestinian woman, for whom safety has been an impossibility for years, was expected to be silent. She was expected to absorb their trauma on top of her own, because her pain is normalized. Her genocide is background noise. She is not seen as a person who deserves safety; she is seen as a person for whom violence is simply the natural order of things.

Nadir put it perfectly: “violence has a post code”. There are certain addresses, certain neighborhoods, certain countries where violence, war, and death are normalized. They are expected. They are seen as the natural state of things for the people who live there.

This is the logic of empire. For the global North – for predominantly white nations – peace is the default. War is something that happens over there. Bombings are aberrations. But for the global South, for the majority-Black and Brown world, violence is framed as a tragic but normal part of life. It’s the background noise of their existence, a constant in news reports that the West can easily tune out.

This isn’t an accident. It is a foundational requirement of colonialism and imperialism.

The Normalization of Violence Against Black and Brown Bodies

This isn’t an accident. It is a foundational requirement of colonialism and imperialism.

White supremacy, Western power, and the global hegemony of the global North are not maintained through ignorance alone. They are maintained through a deliberate and active process of demonization. Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples must be cast as threats, as criminals, as dangers to civilization itself. Why? Because the violence enacted against them is not incidental to Western power—it is essential to it.

• Indigenous peoples cannot be seen as rights-holders defending lands they have cared for for generations. Instead, they must be framed as “obstacles to progress,” as “blockades,” as people who are a “threat” to resource extraction. Only through this framing can governments and corporations justify removing them from their territories, overriding their sovereignty, and extracting land and resources while presenting it all as necessary for economic growth and the public good.
• Black people cannot be seen as scholars, fathers, neighbours, or community members with dignity and potential. Instead, they must be cast as “thugs,” as “gangsters,” as inherently criminal, dangerous “threats”. This framing makes constant surveillance, police violence, and mass incarceration appear like common-sense responses to crime rather than the predictable outcomes of deeply entrenched systems of racial control to extract cheap or free labour.
• Palestinians cannot be seen simply as people with the right to live freely, to remain on their land, or to return to homes from which they were displaced. Instead, they must be framed as a “security threat,” as “terrorists,” as a population that necessitates the perpetual “self-defence” of a powerful and heavily armed state. Through this framing, occupation, displacement, and systems that many human rights organizations describe as apartheid can be presented as unfortunate but necessary measures of protection.
• Muslims cannot be seen as ordinary people – neighbors, families, communities living their lives. Instead, we are repeatedly cast as terrorists, as inherently violent, as a civilizational “threat” to the West and to “Western values” (whatever they may be). This portrayal performs an important political function. By framing Muslims and Muslim-majority societies as dangerous and incompatible with the West, it becomes easier to justify war, occupation, and the extraction of land and resources. With the current US war on Iran being framed in explicitly biblical language Muslims are also cast as a threat to Christianity and Judaism, framing this illegal war as part of a deeper moral or religious battle. It seems the rhetoric of the Crusades never truly went away.

The violence is not a bug; it’s a feature. It is the mechanism by which Western comfort, wealth, and power are secured. And for that mechanism to function smoothly, the people on the receiving end of the violence must be made to deserve it.

This is why Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples are demonized in media, in policy, in education, and in everyday conversation. The demonization ensures that the violence against us is not just normalized, but expected and justified. It becomes part of the natural order: of course those people are violent, of course those places are dangerous, of course those lives matter less.

When violence is normalized, it becomes invisible. And when it’s invisible, it can continue indefinitely.

The Colonial Logic on Campus

We don’t have to look to war zones to see this dynamic play out. It’s happening right now on college campuses. In the ongoing protests for Palestinian liberation, we are witnessing a stark illustration of how “safety” is racialized.

Time and again, we see university administrations prioritize the “safety” of white Jewish students. But what does that safety mean in this context? It is almost always defined as protection from discomfort—from hearing a slogan they disagree with, from having their worldview challenged by pro-Palestinian speech, from feeling emotionally unsettled.

This feeling of discomfort—the threat of an idea—is elevated to the level of a safety crisis. It is met with crackdowns, with police, with institutional condemnation. The priority is the emotional and psychological comfort of a predominantly white population.

Meanwhile, what of the actual safety of Muslim and Palestinian students on those same campuses? They are the ones being punished, being doxxed, receiving death threats, not being allowed to graduate, or being fired from jobs. They are the ones who fear for their lives simply for existing while the institutions they belong to debate whether their very identity is too “controversial” to be spoken.

Here, the definition of safety is divided in two:

• For white people, safety means the absence of discomfort. It is a broad, encompassing concept designed to protect their feelings and their worldview.
• For Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, safety means the absence of mortal danger. And even when that danger is present, in the form of bullets, bombs, or state violence, it is not treated as a crisis. It is treated as normal.

Discomfort vs. Danger

The contrast is damning. The discomfort of the powerful is treated as a threat to national security, while the actual deaths of the oppressed are accepted as the cost of doing business. White people are shielded from the very idea of violence, while Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are expected to live with its constant, tangible reality.

This is not a failure of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed. The safety of white people is built upon the normalization of violence against everyone else. To challenge that violence is to challenge the very foundation of white comfort and privilege.

We cannot talk about safety in a vacuum. We have to ask: Whose safety? Defined by whom? And at whose expense? Until we are willing to see the postal code of violence for what it is – a map of colonial power – we will continue to build a world where some people’s discomfort is a tragedy, and other people’s deaths are just another Tuesday.