Letting Go of Good

This was originally posted, in a slightly different form, on the evaluation blog AEA365.org.

In this post I’m digging into the psychology behind white fragility, trying to answer the question of why we white folks act this way so that we can eventually make different choices.

As we know, white fragility causes harm, sometimes significant harm, to the people around us. None of us want to be that person, so why do we keep doing it? Dr. Dolly Chugh breaks it down:

1. We white folks really want to think of ourselves as “good” (more on that in a minute).
2. But we are — honestly! — a little unsure whether that’s true (again, we’ll get to that), so we really want our goodness to be affirmed by those around us.
3. When it seems to us that we might not be being perceived the way we want to be perceived, we go into crisis mode.
4. This crisis mode is called “self-threat.” It is psychological, but it lives in our bodies and, similar to a physical threat, it evokes the same response: a hyperfocus on self-preservation.
5. In short, we will do anything (really, anything) to regain that alignment between perception and our internal sense of self as good.

What are our options in crisis mode? We often turn to what Sandra Kim calls the Three C’s of Dehumanization. We:

• “Control: try to make people change and force a specific outcome by insisting, pushing, coercing, manipulating, forcing.
• Condemn: make people wrong as people by vilifying, judging, shaming, blaming.
• Crush: deny multiple realities and layers of realities by minimizing, projecting, ignoring, suppressing.”

We do the Three C’s to each other and we do them to ourselves, all toward the goal of self-preservation. That sounds pretty bad, and it is. I’ve done it when getting feedback on my research that makes me want reassurance that I’m “good,” burdening BIPOC colleagues with my poorly-hidden desperation. It can even be violent.

So what can we do to stop this oft-repeated trainwreck? What if we went to the source: our very tenuous hold on our self-image as good, which stems from our role in white supremacy as the oppressors? Dr. Janet Helms describes this dissonance as, “I don’t think I did anything bad in my life, but whenever we talk about these issues I feel like I did something bad in my life.” What if we let that tension go?

What if instead, as Dr. Chugh suggests, we weren’t “good” at all? What if we considered ourselves merely “good-ish”? We are trying to improve, and fail, a lot. And we keep trying with enough faith in ourselves that we will do less harm over time (that’s growth mindset for you learning theory buffs). How much better could we hold ourselves accountable and apologize fully once we released our vice grip on needing to be “good”?

4-step process of white fragility