“Transforming White Fragility Into Courageous Imperfection”
““White fragility” — it’s a term I had never heard before Saturday night. A friend uttered it in reference to how so many white people respond when challenged about racism, and I felt like someone had turned the lights on. It was one of those moments when you hear language that wraps around something you’ve experienced or witnessed, but found impossible to describe. What clarity. What relief.
White fragility is, at its essence, gut level pushback. It’s like the fight or flight response of white people who want to believe that they, and the world by extension, are less racially divisive than they really are. It’s when you feel like the wind has been knocked out of you when a person of color points out that something you’ve said seems rooted in a privileged experience of the world. It’s when you desperately want to defend why a well-intentioned institution that you’re a part of isn’t really racist. It’s when you evade talking about certain parts of who you are for fear that it will make you vulnerable for critique from people of color…
Progressives who align with anti-racist organizing want to prove that we are the “good ones.” Our fragility is born of our desperation to be seen as morally flawless in the eyes of people of color and other white progressives. We reject white supremacy, and yet, we are emotionally invested in a variant of white purity — somehow believing that we can transcend the very system that has given us our privilege, the very system we purport to want to fight against.”
I thought this was great, at least from the perspective of a POC looking into the white person’s experience of anti-racism activism.
so many related-to’s: where I first encountered the concept of White Fragility; a short essay on the phrase “not all…”; a study on how people of different races react to ambiguous and explicit racism; “A white person’s guide to activism” with a great porch-light metaphor; “That awkward moment when I realized my white “liberal” friends were racists”
