White Fragility

White Fragility: why is it so hard for white people to talk about racism?   https://robindiangelo.com/

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Why are we so quickly triggered to anger and defensiveness?

White fragility is the inability to tolerate racial stress. Racial stress is triggered when our positions, perspectives, or advantages are challenged. White fragility functions to block the challenge and regain white racial equilibrium. 

It is a kind of white racial bullying. I’m going to make it so miserable for you to call me out or call me in that I’m just not going to do it. We make sure it is just not worth it because it’ll just make it worse.

White fragility is not weakness per se – it is a powerful means of everyday white racial control as it leverages historical and institutional power to maintain our positions. 

It only takes one angry white person to shut the whole project down. So we are all coddling to keep everything calm.

Much of our awareness and empathy requires that we learn to see how I feel and how I react when my white fragility is challenged day by day.

“When I facilitated antiracism meetings at workplaces with all white people, I was shocked by the hostility and meanness, defensiveness that was there in these mandated meetings.”

There was a  constant claim that racism has no meaning, no relevance in our lives especially as we live profoundly separate and unequal lives. We are not educated to see any of this.

Part of the answer is to change the narrative from “if” to “how”. Society is constantly asking, are you racist or not? Yes or no? And then we debate it. But we must bring to the conversation the questions of “how am I racist?” and we must ask it of people of color.

It helps to change the question so that the moral character of the person is not being challenged; not if but how am I racist.

We can’t live in this culture and grow up in this culture without knowing that it is better to be white. All children understand this. This is the privilege that we grow up in.

White fragility: How little it takes to upset a white person. Sociology of dominance. Causes people to walk on eggshells around us. Our fragility protects us.

White paralysis: We are stuck in it without even knowing it. White silence: Read the article “Nothing to add: The role of white silence in racial discussions”. It is important to make space when necessary. Notice what is going on in the room. The hidden rules. The nonverbal messaging. The unconscious habits. White people tend to speak first, speak most, do the intellectual work before we do the emotional work. White silence communicates something. Just like with male/female dominance, when the power person is silent in a group, this is unsettling to the whole group.

How does the paralysis function? If it functions to protect my self esteem and my comfort first, then it functions to protect my racism. This can be conscious or unconscious. 

There is a psychic weight of racism. We do not bear the weight of it. We prefer our unracialized identity. If we just want a human experience, we go to white people or comfortable people. But when we want black experience, we go to a black person.

Prerequisite: we don’t expect you to be without conditioning… We expect you to be willing to begin the work.

White women's tears: emotions are political. They change the dynamic and expectations in a room. The room is triggered to gather around her and comfort her. It can quickly shut down a meeting.

Most racism plays out not through explicit bias but through implicit bias; by the things we do not say or feel and may never even think about.

I think that the most profound way that my life has been shaped by race is through the power of segregation. Most white people live in segregated settings, choose those settings, and define what is good about a school or a neighborhood by the absence of people of color. That is the way the white people measure the value of their neighborhood and schools. And while we all don’t come out and name it, WE ALL KNOW WHAT IT IS.

I can grow up in a segregated neighborhood, go to a segregated school, and follow the wonderful, safe, secure trajectory that my loving parents laid out for me and not have one mentor or teacher ever tell me how much I have missed out on by not having any trusted friends of color. In other words, I was raised to believe that there is no inherent value in relationships with people of color.

I'm going to repeat that because I think it's very profound and I really want us to sit with it.

 I have to think very deeply about this: What it means to have grown up, born into, go to school, to study, to learn, to play, to worship, to love, to work, and to die in segregation, and not have even one authentic, trusted friendship with a person of color, and not have one single person who loved, mentored or guided me convey that there was any loss. 

If my society, my government, my schools, my teachers, my parents saw value in having those relationships, then I would be given those opportunities. It shapes me profoundly; what I see, what I hear, what I care about, and what I don’t care about, where I live, where I work, and who I love.

More from her book:

"As white Christians blissfully sing ‘God Bless America’ in their sanctuaries adorned with American flags, they look upon their country — and its many structures — with nostalgic pride, while others see betrayal, hurt, and suffering.

"Beyond reaffirming patriotism and nationalism to idolatrous levels and aligning itself with white conservative politicians, racism is just as rampant among white progressives and “liberal” Christians. In her bestselling book ‘White Fragility,’ author Robin DiAngelo notes that “I believe white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color. I define a white progressive as any white person who thinks he or she is not racist, or is less racist, or in the “choir,” or already “gets it.” White progressives can be the most difficult for people of color because, to the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived. None of our energy will go into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives: engaging in ongoing self-awareness, continuing education, relationship building, and actual anti-racist practice. White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism, but our defensiveness and certitude make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so.”

Privilege of Denial

"But racism is similar to the pandemic in another primary way — both are spread, in large part, by willful ignorance. And it takes an extraordinary level of privilege (and effort) to stay ignorant of both realities. In either case, you can only deny the truth if you’ve never had to suffer from it.

At the heart of both issues lies a common factor: a failure of empathy; and a refusal to witness a struggle we have never had to experience for ourselves. It indicates an ability to craft one’s own narrative in order to preserve the level of comfort to which we’ve become accustomed. In order to stop the spread of disease, we have to give up some personal freedoms."

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/irreverin/2020/07/the-privilege-of-denial/?utm_source=Newsletter 

"Revolutions begin when the people defined as a problem say,

 'It's the people who define us as the problem that are the problem." 

(John McKnight)