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The example of a child publicly calling out a black man’s race and embarrassing the mother illustrates several aspects of white children’s racial socialization. First, children learn that it is taboo to openly talk about race. Second, they learn that people should pretend not to notice undesirable aspects that define some people as less valuable than others (a large birthmark on someone’s face, a person using a wheelchair).
One line of King’s speech in particular—that one day he might be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin—was seized upon by the white public because the words were seen to provide a simple and immediate solution to racial tensions: pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end.
But reducing King’s work to this simplistic idea illustrates how movements for social change are co-opted, stripped of their initial challenge, and used against the very cause from which they originated.
When you consider the moral judgment we make about people we deem as racist in our society, the need to deny our own racism—even to ourselves—makes sense. 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.
I am often asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t. In some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow. The adaptations produce the same outcome (people of color are blocked from moving forward) but have been put in place by a dominant white society that won’t or can’t admit to its beliefs. This intransigence results in another pillar of white fragility: the refusal to know.
The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy.
a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.
white fragility enabled the white elite to direct the white working class’s resentment toward people of color. The resentment is clearly misdirected, given that the people who control the economy and who have managed to concentrate more wealth into fewer (white) hands than ever before in human history are the white elite.
Because people of color are not seen as racially innocent, they are expected to speak to issues of race (but must do so on white terms). This idea—that racism is not a white problem—enables us to sit back and let people of color take very real risks of invalidation and retaliation as they share their experiences. But we are not required to take similar cross-racial risks.
Viewing privilege as something that white people are just handed obscures the systematic dimensions of racism that must be actively and passively, consciously and unconsciously, maintained.
the classification of which neighborhoods are good and which are bad is always based on race.
Disagree, between white neighborhoods there’s a class hierarchy
“In a postracial era, we don’t have to say it’s about race or the color of the kids in the building. . . . We can concentrate poverty and kids of color and then fail to provide the resources to support and sustain those schools, and then we can see a school full of black kids and say, ‘Oh, look at their test scores.’ It’s all very tidy now, this whole system.”
I was raised in a society that taught me that there was no loss in the absence of people of color—that their absence was a good and desirable thing to be sought and maintained—while simultaneously denying that fact.
Within this paradigm, to suggest that I am racist is to deliver a deep moral blow—a kind of character assassination.
The good/bad frame is a false dichotomy.
All people hold prejudices, especially across racial lines in a society deeply divided by race.
The good/bad binary certainly obscures the structural nature of racism and makes it difficult for us to see or understand.
unfortunately, white fragility can only protect the problematic behavior you feel so defensive about; it does not demonstrate that you are an open person who has no problematic racial behavior.
The dominant paradigm of racism as discrete, individual, intentional, and malicious acts makes it unlikely that whites will acknowledge any of our actions as racism.
Those who claim to have been taught to treat everyone the same are simply telling me that they don’t understand socialization. It is not possible to teach someone to treat everyone the same.
As a culture, we don’t claim that gender roles and gender conditioning disappear the moment we love someone of the “opposite” gender. I identify as a woman and am married to someone who identifies as a man, yet I would never say, “Because I am married to a man, I have a gender-free life.” We understand that gender is a very deep social construct, that we have different experiences depending on our gender roles, assignments, and expressions, and that we will wrestle with these differences throughout the life of our relationship.
They are also telling me that they believe that racism is uncomplicated and unchanging.
How many white people who marched in the 1960s had authentic cross-racial relationships with African Americans?
For most whites, being the minority in their school or neighborhood is usually temporary.
Our identities are not unique or inherent but constructed or produced through social processes. What’s more, we don’t see through clear or objective eyes—we see through racial lenses. On some level, race is always at play, even in its supposed absence.
Of course, white norms are violated by naming white power. But unequal power relations cannot be challenged if they are not acknowledged.
While it isn’t comfortable for most whites to talk about racism, we must do so if we want to challenge—rather than protect—racism.
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.
Affirmative action is a tool to ensure that qualified minority applicants are given the same employment opportunities as white people. It is a flexible program—there are no quotas or requirements as commonly understood. Moreover, white women have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action, although the program did not initially include them. Corporations are more likely to favor white women and immigrants of color of elite backgrounds from outside the United States when choosing their executives.3 No employer is required to hire an unqualified person of color, but companies are
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“the trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement. It is not the mere presence of black people that is the problem; rather, it is blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship. It is blackness that refuses to accept subjugation, to give up.”
There are three key aspects of Bourdieu’s theory that are relevant to white fragility: field, habitus, and capital. Field is the specific social context the person is in—a party, the workplace, or a school.
Capital is the social value people hold in a particular field; how they perceive themselves and are perceived by others in terms of their power or status.
Habitus includes a person’s internalized awareness of their status, as well as responses to the status of others. In every field, people are (often unconsciously) vying for power, and each field will have rules of the game.
“habitus is neither a result of free will, nor determined by structures, but created by a kind of interplay between the two over time: dispositions that are both shaped by past events and structures, and that shape current practices and structures and also, importantly, that condition our very perceptions of these.”
white fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress in the habitus becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.
One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked.5 Whites
These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions.
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.
FUNCTIONS OF WHITE FRAGILITY Maintain white solidarity Close off self-reflection Trivialize the reality of racism Silence the discussion Make white people the victims
Hijack the conversation Protect a limited worldview Take race off the table Protect white privilege Focus on the messenger, not the message Rally more resources to white people
Thus, the first rule is cardinal: 1. Do not give me feedback on my racism under any circumstances. If you insist on breaking the cardinal rule, then you must follow these other rules: 2. Proper tone is crucial—feedback must be given calmly. If any emotion is displayed, the feedback is invalid and can be dismissed. 3. There must be trust between us. You must trust that I am in no way racist before you can give me feedback on my racism. 4. Our relationship must be issue-free—if there are issues between us, you cannot give me feedback on racism until these unrelated issues are resolved.
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repeat: stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.
When white men come to the rescue of white women in cross-racial settings, patriarchy is reinforced as they play savior to our damsel in distress.
“What has enabled you to be a full, educated, professional adult and not know what to do about racism?”
“Take the initiative and find out on your own.”
have a racist worldview, deep racial bias, racist patterns, and investments in the racist system that has elevated me. Still, I don’t feel guilty about racism. I didn’t choose this socialization, and it could not be avoided. But I am responsible for my role in it. To the degree that I have done my best in each moment to interrupt my participation, I can rest with a clearer conscience. But that clear conscience is not achieved by complacency or a sense that I have arrived.
However, a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.
The default of the current system is the reproduction of racial inequality; our institutions were designed to reproduce racial inequality and they do so with efficiency.
To continue reproducing racial inequality, the system only needs white people to be really nice and carry on, smile at people of color, be friendly across race, and go to lunch together on occasion.
