White Fragility Chapter 4

Today we're in chapter 4 of White Fragility.

Previous Posts
Introduction
Chapter 1: Challenges of Talking Race
Chapter 2: Definitions--Racism and White Supremacy
Chapter 3: Racism after the Civil Rights Movement

Chapter 4: How Does Race Shape the Lives of White People?
1. In this chapter, DiAngelo tries to show the way in which the default of American culture forms white people in racist directions.

1. Belonging
Her first point is that individuals who are white in America have a default sense of "belonging here." They generally don't worry about having problems at a hospital when giving birth. "They did not have to worry about how they would be treated by the hospital staff because of their race" (52). In the typical hospital, there will be a spectrum of employees that includes more white individuals in the roles of doctors and administrators. "In virtually every situation or context deemed normal, neutral, or prestigious in society, I belong racially" as a white person (53).

2. No Racial Weight
As a white person, DiAngelo says, "I don't carry the psychic weight of race" (54). At another institution, there were stories of black students being asked by security what they were doing sitting on campus in a way white students were not. White students were assumed to belong at the college. A black student might be thought to be up to trouble. A professor's daughters were once assumed to be neighborhood kids hanging around the gym rather than participants in a sports training camp.

"Raised in a culture of white supremacy, I exude a deeply internalized assumption of racial superiority" (55).

3. Freedom of Movement
As a white person, I don't think twice about traveling from A to B or staying in particular parts of the country. A person of color thinks much more about such things. Trayvon Martin walked through a white neighborhood in Florida and ended up dead.

4. "Just People"
Representations of human beings are often white by default, including Adam and Eve, including Jesus. Of course Jesus as Jewish was likely a darker skinned man. Adam and Eve may very well have lived in Africa. We typically grow up picturing white individuals as universal human experience, from Shakespeare to Charles Dickens. "Whites are 'just people'" and other races are in distinction from the default.

5. White Solidarity
"White solidarity is the unspoken agreement among whites to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort" (59). I continue to process this one. There is a tendency not to confront bad behavior in social settings in general, so I'm trying to process what is this general tendency and what is race related.

For example, I heard of a dinner once where a son-in-law insulted a daughter. The father, also at the table, left the room rather than confront him. Everyone at the table was white, so it was not a racial dynamic. In short, there is pressure not to confront bullies and bad actors in general. To what extent is the dynamic of non-confrontation coming from this direction rather than a racial one?

Nevertheless, I do believe that there can be "very real consequences of breaking white solidarity" (58). I do believe that a white person who draws attention to issues of race can face a backlash. And I certainly believe that "people of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism."

6. Good Old Days
This was an eye-opening thought to me once upon a time. "The past was great for white people (and white men in particular)" (59). But I also remember the words of Langston Hughes in his 1938 poem, "Let America Be America Again." One of the most striking lines in the poem is, "America was never America to me." It is a powerful poem that reminds us that the great ideal of America came nowhere close to that ideal when it came to people of color.

So the slogan, "Make America Great Again" has a strong overtone of, "Make America White Again." Given the racial dynamics of the Trump administration, there is clearly a racial dimension to this slogan both on the part of the president and a large number of his white followers. And it is no doubt experienced by people of color in that way as well.

7. White Racial Innocence
One aspect of white privilege is the fact that I can usually walk away from discussions of race. People of color cannot because they live race. White people can assume that it is the people of color who have the race problem. For example, studies show that white individuals tend to see people of color as more dangerous and "more prone to crime" than white people (62). However, "research matching census data and police department crime statistics show that this association does not hold."

On the other hand, "it has been well documented that blacks and Latinos are stopped by police more often than whites" (63). When a white juvenile goes before a judge, they tend to be shown more compassion, with bad behavior attributed to external factors of home and such. When a black or Latino youth go before the judge, "the cause of the crime is more often attributed to something internal to the person."

"Simply getting whites to acknowledge that our race gives us advantages is a major effort."

Probably the most controversial part of the chapter is discussion of whether a white person could have such advantages and not know about it, for it not to involve some level of intentionality. My own experience has been that we by and large do not notice these advantages. I'm not saying that is true of everyone. Some things skirt a person's conscious mind. You see them when they are pointed out. You realize they were always lurking nearby in your mind, but you never really focused on them.

Another part of the chapter that was food for thought had to do with the fact that white individuals tend to look to people of color to teach us about racism. We appoint diversity officers at colleges who are almost always people of color. In a sense, we ask people of color to do our work (84). There can be a kind of tokenism here.

An issue I have noticed lately is a fatigue among people of color in relation to helping white people do "therapy" with regard to race. I talked once to a person trying to help an organization become more diverse and more aware of race. He remarked that people like him often get burned out and just return to work that does not involve so much resistance and hostility.

I saw this dynamic recently on a Wesleyan pastors feed. There was a sense that some pastors of color felt like giving up on the denseness and unintentionally offensive nature of so many Wesleyan pastors.

8. Segregated Lives
James Baldwin famously called Sunday morning "the most segregated hour in American life" (65). In general, white individuals feel pretty comfortable with the way American culture tends to segregate them toward the top. "Upward mobility is the great class goal in the United States and the social environment gets tangibly whiter the higher up you climb" (66).

DiAngelo gives statistics in this chapter on the racial make-up of the richest people in the world and the US. "Of the world's richest people, nine are white men" (60).

"The most profound message of racial segregation may be that the absence of people of color from our lives is no real loss" (67). "Telling me to treat everyone the same is not enough to override this socialization" (69).