White Fragility chapter 8: Whiplash

I managed to read two chapters of White Fragility today, chapter 8... but I'm just posting on one because I'm tired. :-)

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?
Chapter 5: The Good/Bad Binary
Chapter 6: Anti-Blackness
Chapter 7: White Triggers

Chapter 8: The Result: White Fragility
1. "A remarkable preponderance of white Americans believe that they also experience racial prejudice" (107). "More than half of whites--55 percent--surveyed say that, generally speaking, they believe there is discrimination against white people today" (108).

Meanwhile, "white people's moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging their complicity with it" (108). "Whites invoke the power to choose when, how, and to what extent racism is addressed or challenged" (109). "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."

"The language of violence... is not without significance, as it is another example of how white fragility distorts reality" (110). "By employing terms that connote physical abuse, whites tap into the classic story that people of color (particularly African-Americans) are dangerous and violent."

Also, "Because the new racial climate in America forbids the open expression of racially based feelings, views, and positions, when whites discuss issues that make them uncomfortable, they become almost incomprehensible" (110, Bonilla-Silva).

"White equilibrium is a cocoon of racial comfort, centrality, superiority, entitlement, racial apathy, and obliviousness, all rooted in an identity of being good people free of racism Challenging this cocoon throws off our racial balance" (112).

2. In the news today is the killing of Cannon Hinnant. This 5 year old boy was tragically killed by a black man in Virginia. The father of the boy did not believe that the killing was race-related. Indeed, we have to wonder if this man suffers from mental illness. He was quickly arrested and is in jail.

Predictably, certain media outlets have seized on the incident as if to say, "See, a horrible black man killed a white boy. Why isn't this in the national news?" As we have read in DiAngelo, the charge is that it is racist and inequitable not to mention both in discussions of race.

But there is no reason to push this murder into the national race discussion except for racism. It is the white supremacist element of American culture trying to re-establish equilibrium from the BLM movement after the death of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, and others. It attempts to create a moral equivalency between white police violence on the African-American community and the act of this individual black man, whose act may have had nothing to do with race.

The meaning of such rhetoric in large part has to do with its trajectory. The violence of white police against black men has a history going back to the slave trade, to slavery, to the laws of the south after reconstruction that jailed black men for nothing, to lynching, to abhorrent movies like The Birth of a Nation, to the Jim Crow laws, to housing rules that created what would become violent ghettos, to laws that disproportionately incarcerate black men.

When we protest the killing of George Floyd, we are standing against four hundred years of white supremacy that is cooked into our society. When we bring race into the killing of Cannon Hinnant against this backdrop, at best we are tone deaf. More likely, we are subconsciously (or consciously) trying to re-establish the white supremacist narrative that black men are dangerous criminals who should be locked up or killed with a vengeance. There is no reason to reference this story in relation to race except an offensive ignorance or a racist and white supremacist motivation.

3. "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" (112). It is a "sociology of dominance" (113).

She ends with a question she often poses to people of color in her training sessions. "What would it be like if you could simply give us feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?" A man of color sighed once and said, "It would be revolutionary" (113).

Last night in the Race and American Christianity course, a theme was mentioned I have heard often of late. Black individuals are tired of having to defend the claim that they are the recipients of regular prejudice and racism. One student told of how, in a mixed gathering, police in the room immediately singled him out as suspicious. We hear this story over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Black individuals are tired of having to explain this to white people. They shouldn't have to. It's time for those of us who are advocates for righteousness to handle our own people's problems.