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It’s not White Fragility, it’s White Flammability
Synonyms for flammable: combustible, incendiary, unstable, ignitable
On the morning of November 15, 2015, white Minneapolis police officers Mark Ringgenberg and Jason Schwartze shot to death Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man they had on the ground.
On March 30, 2016, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman, a white man, announced he would not bring charges against the officers.
My fourth book, an anthology of sixteen essays by Native writers and writers of color on racism in Minnesota, would come out two weeks after. In the introduction to A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, April 2016) I recommend that white people look up and read Robin Di Angelo’s work on white fragility. Her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism wouldn’t come out for more than two years, on June 26, 2018.
I read her book when it came out, and appreciated it, and hope it’s helpful to the millions (?) of white (and non-white) people who have made it a New York Times bestseller.
I’ve been thinking about her term “white fragility” since I read it in an article by her, probably in 2015. It’s never sat comfortably for me and I haven’t used it much.
