I was impressed by White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. The book shifts the racial justice conversation from racial prejudice to racial privilege. It's easy to dismiss racial prejudice because most of us aren't actively prejudiced. It's much harder to acknowledge racial privilege and the things we do to enable it. “Conversations about race [challenge] our very identities as good moral people and we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense”
We have to acknowledge that humans naturally create systems that don't just create acts of violence that serve us. We also create systems that protect us from even having to think about it. It's the equivalent of a person who condemns a neighborhood kid for killing a cat while eating a hamburger. We may never harm an animal, but our diet enables a system that does AND a system of packaging that violence in a way that protects us from feeling guilt.
An example:
Most know Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that made separate but [un]equal education illegal within school districts in the South. Far fewer know that less than 20 years later, Milliken v. Bradley made separate but unequal education legal between school districts in the North. A white family in Detroit could easily move a few miles north into a city that made it very difficult for Blacks, but had better schools and allowed their children to grow up blissfully ignorant of the things their parents, politicians, and policemen did to separate the races and disproportionately distribute privilege.
Robin Diangelo removes the blissful ignorance.
“I am a white woman … The room is filled with tension and charged with hostility. I have ... articulated a definition of racism [in which] white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality … Conversations about race [challenge] our very identities as good moral people and we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense … that often triggers a range of defensive responses. I conceptualize this process as white fragility.”
John McWhorter suggests that her style and not the situation is the reason this topic is so uncomfortable. The person that introduces this topic in a way that is comfortable is not doing it justice. It's a throwback to an era when the slave, the porter, and the prostitute were taught to accept abuse without making the abuser uncomfortable.
Comments