S/O Race - White Fragility

[pizzapizza]

I wanted to share a good article that I read on CEP about White Fragility as well as a video.  If you haven't read this I would really recommend it.  

www.alternet.org/culture/why-white-people-freak-out-when-theyre-called-out-about-race

The professor mentioned in the article, the abstract and her paper on White Fragility can be found here:

libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249

White Fragility video:

www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/786655684809274/?pnref=story

Alternet Article text below.




Why White People Freak Out When They're Called Out About Race

'White fragility' is a defensive response to real conversations about race.

By Sam Adler-Bell / AlterNet March 12, 2015





Stop me if you’ve heard this one.



Last year, a white male Princeton undergraduate was asked by a classmate to “check his privilege.” Offended by this suggestion, he shot off a 1,300-word essay to the Tory, a right-wing campus newspaper.In it, he wrote about his grandfather who fled the Nazis to Siberia, his grandmother who survived a concentration camp in Germany, about the humble wicker basket business they started in America. He railed against his classmates for “diminishing everything [he’d] accomplished, all the hard work [he’d] done.”



His missive was reprinted by Time. He was interviewed by the New York Times and appeared on Fox News. He became a darling of white conservatives across the country.



What he did not do, at any point, was consider whether being white and male might have given him—if not his ancestors—some advantage in achieving incredible success in America. He did not, in other words, check his privilege.



To Robin DiAngelo, professor of multicutural education at Westfield State University and author of What Does it Mean to Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, Tal Fortgang’s essay—indignant, defensive, beside-the-point, somehow both self-pitying and self-aggrandizing—followed a familiar script. As an anti-racist educator for more than two decades, DiAngelo has heard versions of it recited hundreds of times by white men and women in her workshops.



She’s heard it so many times, in fact, that she came up with a term for it: "white fragility," which she defined in a 2011 journal article as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”



When the Black Lives Matter movement marched in the streets, holding up traffic, disrupting commerce, and refusing to allow "normal life" to resume—insofar as normalcy means a system that permits police and vigilantes to murder black men and women with impunity—white people found themselves in tense conversations online, with friends and in the media about privilege, white supremacy and racism. You could say white fragility was at an all-time high.



I spoke with DiAngelo about how to deal with all the fragile white people, and why it’s worth doing so.



Sam Adler-Bell: How did you come to write about "white fragility"?



Robin DiAngelo: To be honest, I wanted to take it on because it’s a frustrating dynamic that I encounter a lot. I don’t have a lot of patience for it. And I wanted to put a mirror to it.



I do atypical work for a white person, which is that I lead primarily white audiences in discussions on race every day, in workshops all over the country. That has allowed me to observe very predictable patterns. And one of those patterns is this inability to tolerate any kind of challenge to our racial reality. We shut down or lash out or in whatever way possible block any reflection from taking place.



Of course, it functions as means of resistance, but I think it’s also useful to think about it as fragility, as inability to handle the stress of conversations about race and racism



Sometimes it’s strategic, a very intentional push back and rebuttal. But a lot of the time, the person simply cannot function. They regress into an emotional state that prevents anybody from moving forward.



SAB: Carla Murphy recently referenced "white fragility" in an article forColorlines, and I’ve seen it referenced on Twitter and Facebook a lot lately. It seems like it’s having a moment. Why do you think that is?



RD: I think we get tired of certain terms. What I do used to be called "diversity training," then "cultural competency" and now, "anti-racism." These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms or else people won’t engage.



And I think "white privilege" has reached that point. It rocked my world when I first really got it, when I came across Peggy McIntosh. It’s a really powerful start for people. But unfortunately it's been played so much now that it turns people off.



SAB: What causes white fragility to set in?



RD: For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”



In large part, white fragility—the defensiveness, the fear of conflict—is rooted in this good/bad binary. If you call someone out, they think to themselves, “What you just said was that I am a bad person, and that is intolerable to me.” It’s a deep challenge to the core of our identity as good, moral people.



The good/bad binary is also what leads to the very unhelpful phenomenon of un-friending on Facebook.



SAB: Right, because the instinct is to un-friend, to dissociate from those bad white people, so that I’m not implicated in their badness.



RD: When I’m doing a workshop with white people, I’ll often say, “If we don’t work with each other, if we give in to that pull to separate, who have we left to deal with the white person that we’ve given up on and won’t address?



SAB: A person of color.



RD: Exactly. And white fragility also comes from a deep sense of entitlement. Think about it like this: from the time I opened my eyes, I have been told that as a white person, I am superior to people of color. There’s never been a space in which I have not been receiving that message. From what hospital I was allowed to be born in, to how my mother was treated by the staff, to who owned the hospital, to who cleaned the rooms and took out the garbage. We are born into a racial hierarchy, and every interaction with media and culture confirms it—our sense that, at a fundamental level, we are superior.



And, the thing is, it feels good. Even though it contradicts our most basic principles and values. So we know it, but we can never admit it. It creates this kind of dangerous internal stew that gets enacted externally in our interactions with people of color, and is crazy-making for people of color. We have set the world up to preserve that internal sense of superiority and also resist challenges to it. All while denying that anything is going on and insisting that race is meaningless to us.



SAB: Something that amazes me is the sophistication of some white people’s defensive maneuvers. I have a black friend who was accused of "online harassment" by a white friend after he called her out in a harsh way. What do you see going on there?



RD: First of all, whites often confuse comfort with safety. We say we don’t feel safe, when what we mean is that we don’t feel comfortable. Secondly, no white person looks at a person of color through objective eyes. There’s been a lot of research in this area. Cross-racially, we do not see with objective eyes. Now you add that he’s a black man. It’s not a fluke that she picked the word "harassed." In doing that, she’s reinforcing a really classic, racist paradigm: White women and black men. White women’s frailty and black men’s aggressiveness and danger.



But even if she is feeling that, which she very well may be, we should be suspicious of our feelings in these interactions. There’s no such thing as pure feeling. You have a feeling because you’ve filtered the experience through a particular lens. The feeling is the outcome. It probably feels natural, but of course it’s shaped by what you believe.



SAB: There’s also the issue of "tone-policing" here, right?



RD: Yes. One of the things I try to work with white people on is letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback. We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the pain we’ve caused.



In my workshops, one of the things I like to ask white people is, “What are the rules for how people of color should give us feedback about our racism? What are the rules, where did you get them, and whom do they serve?” Usually those questions alone make the point.



It’s like if you’re standing on my head and I say, “Get off my head,” and you respond, “Well, you need to tell me nicely.” I’d be like, “No. Fuck you. Get off my fucking head.”



In the course of my work, I’ve had many people of color give me feedback in ways that might be perceived as intense or emotional or angry. And on one level, it’s personal—I did do that thing that triggered the response, but at the same time it isn’t onlypersonal. I represent a lifetime of people that have hurt them in the same way that I just did.



And, honestly, the fact that they are willing to show me demonstrates, on some level, that they trust me.



SAB: What do you mean?



RD: If people of color went around showing the pain they feel in every moment that they feel it, they could be killed. It is dangerous. They cannot always share their outrage about the injustice of racism. White people can’t tolerate it. And we punish it severely—from job loss, to violence, to murder.



For them to take that risk and show us, that is a moment of trust. I say, bring it on, thank you.



When I’m doing a workshop, I’ll often ask the people of color in the room, somewhat facetiously, “How often have you given white people feedback about our inevitable and often unconscious racist patterns and had that go well for you?” And they laugh.



Because it just doesn’t go well. And so one time I asked, “What would your daily life be like if you could just simply give us feedback, have us receive it graciously, reflect on it and work to change the behavior? What would your life be like?”



And this one man of color looked at me and said, “It would be revolutionary.”



SAB: I notice as we’ve been talking that you almost always use the word "we" when describing white people’s tendencies. Can you tell me why you do that?



RD: Well, for one, I’m white (and you’re white). And even as committed as I am, I’m not outside of anything that I’m talking about here. If I went around saying white people this and white people that, it would be a distancing move. I don’t want to reinforce the idea that there are some whites who are done, and others that still need work. There’s no being finished.



Plus, in my work, I’m usually addressing white audiences, and the "we" diminishes defensiveness somewhat. It makes them more comfortable. They see that I’m not just pointing fingers outward.



SAB: Do you ever worry about re-centering whiteness?



RD: Well, yes. I continually struggle with that reality. By standing up there as an authority on whiteness, I’m necessarily reinforcing my authority as a white person. It goes with the territory. For example, you’re interviewing me now, on whiteness, and people of color have been saying these things for a very long time.



On the one hand, I know that in many ways, white people can hear me in a way that they can’t hear people of color. They listen. So by god, I’m going to use my voice to challenge racism. The only alternative I can see is to not speak up and challenge racism. And that is not acceptable to me.



It’s sort of a master’s tools dilemma.



SAB: Yes, and racism is something that everyone thinks they’re an authority on.



RD: That drives me crazy. I’ll run into someone I haven’t seen in 20 years in the grocery store, and they’ll say, “Hi! What’ve you been doing?”



And I say, “I got my Ph.D.”



And they say, “Oh wow, what in?”



“Race relations and white racial identity.”



And they’ll go “Oh, well you know. People just need to—”



As if they’re going to give me the one-sentence answer to arguably the most challenging social dynamic of our time. Like, hey, why did I knock myself out for 20 years studying, researching, and challenging this within myself and others? I should have just come to you! And the answer is so simple! I’ve never heard that one before!



Imagine if I was an astronomer. Everybody has a basic understanding of the sky, but they would not debate an astronomer on astronomy. The arrogance of white people faced with questions of race is unbelievable.



Read more: pandce.proboards.com/thread/543534/white-fragility-defensive-response-conversations#ixzz4Ixn7NbQS

[VillainV]

Thanks for this.

[scribellesam]

I read this earlier in the week on CEP and found it very interesting. I'm very defensive to criticism in general and it's good to have a reminder to change my perspective from my own introspection, especially when it involves race issues.

[longtimenopost]

Enlightening. I very much wish I read this on CEP before posting yesterday and adding insult to injury.

[timorousbeastie]

Thank you for sharing.

[water*drop]

Thanks for sharing. I also like this article by the same prof (and I probably originally read it on CEP, too):

goodmenproject.com/featured-content/white-fragility-why-its-so-hard-to-talk-to-white-people-about-racism-twlm/

[t]

Thanks for sharing. I hadn't really heard of this term prior to reading the other thread.

[jeaniebueller]

Will read these later. Thanks for posting.

[brandienee]

Thank you for posting this. This is perfect. The idea of comfort and safety really hits the nail on the head here, especially with what we've been experiencing the board. We (okay, I )really need to learn that comfort =\= safety. Especially if it means speaking up for what's right and what's comfortable.

[mskitkat]

Thank you for posting.

[redheadk]

These are great articles. Thanks for sharing. I really want to watch the video, hopefully DD will go to sleep soon so I can get out of her room.

[Velar Fricative]

I think about using my voice as a white person a lot. On the one hand, it's a damn shame that it isn't enough for POC to constantly voice these issues for anything to improve (because after all, we have a black president so racism is over!). On the other hand, if that's what will help more people understand yesterday's AND today's injustices towards POC, then we have to keep talking about it.

[azurely]

Interesting. I have never heard the term "white fragility" so this was a good read.

[undecidedowl]

Thank you. That was definitely worth reading. The natural white tendencies he mentioned resonate with me and I think being aware of them is crucial to overcoming them.

I will say, I was the first one to call out wiseowl and it was uncomfortable for me. I saw the pictures of her children and I wasn't sure of her race. I wondered if I was 'right' in my gut feel that her post was highly inappropriate. I didn't want to overstep my bounds as I'm very non confrontational. But as I'm learning, it's not about me and it's not about my feelings. I'll keeping working on it.

[bugandbibs]

I just had a conversation with my (white) husband about this. He doesn't understand why I don't want to help people learn not to be racist. Like its my job to hold their hand and explain stuff.

NOT MY FUCKING JOB! I'll just be angry.

[elleblue]

Aug 31, 2016 21:08:23 GMT -5 water*drop said:

Thanks for sharing. I also like this article by the same prof (and I probably originally read it on CEP, too):

goodmenproject.com/featured-content/white-fragility-why-its-so-hard-to-talk-to-white-people-about-racism-twlm/

I was just coming in here to post this. I originally posted it on CEP back in July because it really helped to explain why so many people I expect better of, don't do better. Hopefully it will prove enlightening to others as well. 

[havarti]

"There's no being finished." That phrase made me step back and catch my breath. It's so hard to hear, but it's so true.

[pennylane]

I missed this on CEP last month, so thank you for reposting. This has me thinking about some of my past interactions, and I am very disappointed in things I have said/done. I will do better.

[suzubell]

"Imagine if I was an astronomer. Everybody has a basic understanding of the sky, but they would not debate an astronomer on astronomy. The arrogance of white people faced with questions of race is unbelievable."
This is perfectly states such a key issue. Tim Wise does a lot of work on the same concepts and talks often about how if you have to hear the racism is a problem from a white person in order to get it, you're a huge part of the problem.

[osulori]

Thank you for posting this.

[raangoli]

Thank you for posting this. I'm also eager to read the other articles posted yesterday and today.

[gibbinator]

Ugh I remember that article when it came out.
I think this article was posted on CEP recently? It seems familiar to me. Good re-read though

[bearbaby]

This was a great read, thank you for posting. I was especially struck by:

RD: For white people, their identities rest on the idea of racism as about good or bad people, about moral or immoral singular acts, and if we’re good, moral people we can’t be racist – we don’t engage in those acts. This is one of the most effective adaptations of racism over time—that we can think of racism as only something that individuals either are or are not “doing.”

as a key passage in general, and in particular regarding recent threads with appropriate call-outs on racist remarks and the ensuing defensiveness and/or obtuseness of those called out for their comments.

[sneetch]

Thank you for posting this. My husband and I have been discussing racism quite a bit lately, and I am going to send this to him so we can talk about it.

The other week a family member was dismissing the idea of white privilege and I stood firm in explaining why we do have it. It was uncomfortable but I know I can't avoid those types of conversations anymore based on my own discomfort.

[underwaterrhymes]

It's really important to understand that even if you are not intentionally racist, you - as a white person - benefit from being white and from institutionalized racism every single day and likely commit microagressions all the time.

So many people get defensive about this because we were erroneously taught that racism means using the n-word. And we were taught that the goal is to be colorblind. But racism is so much more than that and striving to be colorblind has only contributed to it.

[anna7602]

Aug 31, 2016 22:04:07 GMT -5 undecidedowl said:

I will say, I was the first one to call out wiseowl and it was uncomfortable for me. I saw the pictures of her children and I wasn't sure of her race. I wondered if I was 'right' in my gut feel that her post was highly inappropriate. I didn't want to overstep my bounds as I'm very non confrontational. But as I'm learning, it's not about me and it's not about my feelings. I'll keeping working on it.

I didn't see her post when it originally came up or even go back to really look at the pictures of her children, but your saying this reminded me of something I should probably post in the flame-free racial thread. I have mentioned on the boards in the past that I've had quite a few Hispanic strangers come up to me and tell me how "beautiful" DD is because she looks so white/so "American." (she has lighter-colored hair than DS, particularly when she was younger.) One poster (whose name I can't remember right now and going through the search function didn't yield me the specific comment) told me to consider that perhaps it was being said to me in a "your kid's life will be so much easier than mine" kind of way, not necessarily an "I embrace our culture's idealization of white skin as beautiful" kind of way.

That did give me pause for thought, but... I feel like my knee-jerk reaction to finding a statement like this abhorrent shouldn't have to take into account the intent of the remark. Yet I remember reading the poster's comment at the time and feeling like I had no right to judge the person making the beauty remark to me without any knowledge of their life or circumstances. 

ETA: I just realized that I confused cookiemonster and wiseowl. So now my statement makes no sense. Argh. 

[aspentosh]

Sept 1, 2016 8:25:51 GMT -5 underwaterrhymes said:

It's really important to understand that even if you are not intentionally racist, you - as a white person - benefit from being white and from institutionalized racism every single day and likely commit microagressions all the time.

So many people get defensive about this because we were erroneously taught that racism means using the n-word. And we were taught that the goal is to be colorblind. But racism is so much more than that and striving to be colorblind has only contributed to it.

This is so beautifully put. 

[schrodinger]

Thanks for posting the links.

One of the things I try to work with white people on is letting go of our criteria about how people of color give us feedback. We have to build our stamina to just be humble and bear witness to the pain we’ve caused.

In my workshops, one of the things I like to ask white people is, “What are the rules for how people of color should give us feedback about our racism? What are the rules, where did you get them, and whom do they serve?” Usually those questions alone make the point.

It’s like if you’re standing on my head and I say, “Get off my head,” and you respond, “Well, you need to tell me nicely.” I’d be like, “No. Fuck you. Get off my fucking head.”

This is one that I think we (MMM)* need to spend more time reflecting on.  The "whom do they serve" question really drove the point home to me.  Trying to police tone in the context of racial discussions just proves the point that we are complicit and racism.

ETA: Obviously not just MMM needs to do better on this, just that this was the first reaction to pointing out the racist comment and many people agreed with it.

[anna7602]

Bumping this.

[matildasun]

I admit my first response to conversations about racist attitudes are defensive, "not me! I don't do _________. I used to do that but then______". Or to chime in with something positive I have done. I have been working on both of those things, by attempting to take my feelings out of it as much as I can.