White Fragility
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"It persists today in woke rhetoric. The Atlantic’s Emma Green has noted the increasingly religious character of progressive activism, and as linguistics professor John McWhorter has written, “the call for people to soberly ‘acknowledge’ their White Privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian.” White people bear America’s original sin, and their road to salvation lies in reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and attending DiAngelo’s seminars." [1] |
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White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism is a 2018 non-fiction book written by Robin DiAngelo.
The book coined the term "white fragility".
She has said that "white privilege can be thought of as unstable racial equilibrium", and that when this equilibrium is challenged, the resulting racial stress can become intolerable and trigger a range of defensive responses. DiAngelo defines these behaviors as white fragility. For example, DiAngelo observed in her studies that some white people, when confronted with racial issues concerning white privilege, may respond with dismissal, distress, or other defensive responses because they may feel personally implicated in white supremacy.
Elsewhere, it has been summarized as "the trademark inability of white Americans to meaningfully own their unearned privilege".
DiAngelo also writes that white privilege is very rarely discussed and that even multicultural education courses tend to use vocabulary that further obfuscates racial privilege and defines race as something that only concerns blacks. She suggests using loaded terminology with negative connotations to people of color adds to the cycle of white privilege.
It is far more the norm for these courses and programs to use racially coded language such as 'urban,' 'inner city,' and 'disadvantaged' but to rarely use 'white' or 'overadvantaged' or 'privileged.' This racially coded language reproduces racist images and perspectives while it simultaneously reproduces the comfortable illusion that race and its problems are what 'they' have, not us.
She does say, however, that defensiveness and discomfort from white people in response to being confronted with racial issues is not irrational but rather is often driven by subconscious, sometimes even well-meaning, attitudes toward racism.
Overview
A book on challenging racism by working against and understanding what the author terms "white fragility", a reaction in which white people feel attacked or offended when the topic of racism arises. The book discusses many different aspects and manifestations of white fragility that DiAngelo personally encountered in her work as a diversity and inclusion training facilitator.
See also
