More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 26 - December 15, 2018
We believe we are superior at a deeply internalized level and act on this belief in the practice of our lives, but we must deny this belief to fit into society and maintain our self-identity as good, moral people.
Today we have a cultural norm that insists we hide our racism from people of color and deny it among ourselves, but not that we actually challenge it. In fact, we are socially penalized for challenging racism.
Belonging has settled deep into my consciousness; it shapes my daily thoughts and concerns, what I reach for in life, and what I expect to find. The experience of belonging is so natural that I do not have to think about it.
This is yet another example of the concept of whiteness as property discussed earlier: whiteness has psychological advantages that translate into material returns.
But when we are not looking for the black or Asian perspective, we return to white writers, reinforcing the idea of whites as just human, and people of color as particular kinds (racialized) of humans. This also allows white (male) writers to be seen as not having an agenda or any particular perspective, while racialized (and gendered) writers do.
White solidarity requires both silence about anything that exposes the advantages of the white position and tacit agreement to remain racially united in the protection of white supremacy.
Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity.
Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy.
Since 2015, the richest 1 percent has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet owns.
In the US, over the last thirty years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50 percent has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1 percent have grown by 300 percent.
The call to Make America Great Again worked powerfully in service of the racial manipulation of white people, diverting blame away from the white elite and toward various peoples of color—for example, undocumented workers, immigrants, and the Chinese—for the current conditions of the white working class.
It has not been African Americans who resist integration efforts; it has always been whites.15 The practice of our lives as a white collective has rarely been in alignment with the values we profess.
Whites continually receive the benefit of the doubt not granted to people of color—our race alone helps establish our innocence.
The most profound message of racial segregation may be that the absence of people of color from our lives is no real loss.
In this way, the good/bad binary makes it nearly impossible to talk to white people about racism, what it is, how it shapes all of us, and the inevitable ways that we are conditioned to participate in it.
“Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen.
The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic. To move beyond defensiveness, we have to let go of this common belief.
If you believe that you are being told you are a bad person, all your energy is likely to go toward denying this possibility and invalidating the messenger rather than trying to understand why what you’ve said or done is hurtful.
“How does this claim function in the conversation?”
they all exempt the person from any responsibility for or participation in the problem.
This claim rests on a definition of racism as conscious intolerance; a racist is someone who presumably cannot tolerate even the sight of a person of color.
The problem is the misinformation that circulates around us and causes our differential treatment to be inequitable.
As a culture, we don’t claim that gender roles and gender conditioning disappear the moment we love someone of the “opposite” gender.
No person of color whom I’ve met has said that racism isn’t at play in his or her friendships with white people. Some whites are more thoughtful, aware, and receptive to feedback than others, but no cross-racial relationship is free from the dynamics of racism in this society.
While a white person may have been picked on—even mercilessly—by being in the numerical minority in a specific context, the individual was experiencing race prejudice and discrimination, not racism. This distinction is not meant to minimize the white person’s experience, but aims to clarify and to prevent rendering the terms interchangeable and thus meaningless.
A racism-free upbringing is not possible, because racism is a social system embedded in the culture and its institutions. We are born into this system and have no say in whether we will be affected by it.
A parent training a child not to say certain things that are overtly racist is teaching the child self-censorship rather than how to examine the deeply embedded racial messages we all absorb. Ideally, we would teach our children how to recognize and challenge prejudice, rather than deny it.
Our identities are not unique or inherent but constructed or produced through social processes.
Refusing to engage in an authentic exploration of racial realities erases (and denies) alternate racial experiences. If we block out other realities by not discussing them, we can pretend that they don’t exist, thereby assuming a shared racial experience.
Racism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that I do not see myself escaping from that continuum in my lifetime. But I can continually seek to move further along it. I am not in a fixed position on the continuum; my position is dictated by what I am actually doing at a given time.
Scholars have argued that whites split off from themselves and project onto black people the aspects that we don’t want to own in ourselves.
We see anti-blackness in how much more harshly we criticize blacks, by every measure.
I take this to mean that whites can only be white if someone is not white—if someone is the opposite of white. White is a false identity, an identity of false superiority. In that sense, whiteness isn’t real.
To put it bluntly, I believe that the white collective fundamentally hates blackness for what it reminds us of: that we are capable and guilty of perpetrating immeasurable harm and that our gains come through the subjugation of others.
Our need to deny the bewildering manifestations of anti-blackness that reside so close to the surface makes us irrational, and that irrationality is at the heart of white fragility and the pain it causes people of color.
whites both expect racial comfort and become less tolerant of racial stress.
When ideologies such as color blindness, meritocracy, and individualism are challenged, intense emotional reactions are common.
All these responses constitute white fragility—the result of the reduced psychosocial stamina that racial insulation inculcates.
Because it is repetitive, our socialization produces and reproduces thoughts, perceptions, expressions, and actions. Thus, habitus can be thought of as a person’s familiar ways of perceiving, interpreting, and responding to the social cues around him or her.
There are three key aspects of Bourdieu’s theory that are relevant to white fragility: field, habitus, and capital.
Habitus includes a person’s internalized awareness of his or her status, as well as responses to the status of others.
These interruptions can take a variety of forms and come from a range of sources, including • Suggesting that a white person’s viewpoint comes from a racialized frame of reference (challenge to objectivity) • People of color talking directly about their own racial perspectives (challenge to white taboos on talking openly about race) • People of color choosing not to protect white people’s feelings about race (challenge to white racial expectations and the need for, or entitlement to, racial comfort) • People of color being unwilling to tell their stories or answer questions about their racial
...more
Anger toward the trigger, shutting down and/or tuning out, indulgence in emotional incapacitation such as guilt or “hurt feelings,” exiting, or a combination of these responses results.
If we become adults who explicitly oppose racism, as do many, we often organize our identity around a denial of our racially based privileges that reinforce racist disadvantage for others.
The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous.
The use of this language of violence illustrates how fragile and ill-equipped most white people are to confront racial tensions, and their subsequent projection of this tension onto people of color.6
This reluctance maintains white power because the ability to determine which narratives are authorized and which are suppressed is the foundation of cultural domination.
“If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one’s entitlement to resources, it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenges to this entitlement.”8
White fragility functions as a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me—no matter how diplomatically you try to do so—that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again.
White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people’s socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy.
