White Fragility

Those are the very first words of the book (following the Foreword) from the “Author’s Note.” Page xiii. Quick check in: Are you feeling defensive yet? If so, say “hi” to your White Fragility.

If not, perhaps this will do the trick:

“Take women’s suffrage. If being a woman denies you the right to vote, you ipso facto cannot grant it to yourself. And you certainly cannot vote for your right to vote. If men control all the mechanisms that exclude women from voting as well as the mechanisms that can reverse that exclusion, women must call on men for justice. You could not have had a conversation about women’s right to vote and men’s need to grant it without naming women and men. Not naming the groups that face barriers only serves those who already have access; the assumption is that the access enjoyed by the controlling group is universal. For example, although we are taught that women were granted suffrage in 1920, we ignore the fact that it was white women who received full access or that it was white men who granted it. Not until the 1960s, through the Voting Rights Act, were all women—regardless of race—granted full access to suffrage. Naming who has access and who doesn’t guides our efforts in challenging justice.”

Robin shares all that to make the point that, to have meaningful discussions about race, we, as WHITE people, must acknowledge our WHITENESS.

She says: “I am white and I am addressing a common white dynamic. I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective. This usage may be jarring to white readers because we are so rarely asked to think about ourselves or fellow whites in racial terms. But rather than retreat in the face of that discomfort, we can practice building our stamina for the critical examination of white identity—a necessary antidote to white fragility.”

Note: I had my heart and brain blown open so many times as I read this book that it took me 90 minutes to get through the first 30 pages of the book. (To put it in perspective, I usually get through 50-75 pages of a “normal” book in that same time.)

After my first Deep Work session reading this book, I walked into the kitchen and asked Alexandra: “Do you know when women got the right to vote?” She guessed 1920. I said, “Exactly.” And: “Isn’t that CRAZY that women couldn’t vote from Day 1?”

Then I said: “You know when BLACK women got the right to vote?” No response. Just an anticipatory wince. Black women got the right to vote at the same time, right? Wrong. The majority of black women didn’t get the right to vote until 1965.

I’m not sure what’s more shocking: The fact that that’s a fact or the fact that I, living in my comfortable little white bubble, didn’t know that that’s a fact.

Then Alexandra said, “When was Oprah born.” “Before 1965. Her mom couldn’t vote,” I said. Neither could her grandmother who taught her to read at age 3. Her great-great-grandparents? They were slaves.

Gah. Enter: White Fragility. And the call to humbly and courageously endure the discomfort to cultivate our “stamina” to figure out how we can play our racial roles well.

P.S. The Foreword is written by Michael Eric Dyson. He tells us: “To be sure, like the rest of race, whiteness is a fiction, what in the jargon of the academy is termed a social construct, an agreed-on myth that has empirical grit because of its effect, not its essence. But whiteness goes even one better: it is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius. Whiteness embodies Charles Baudelaire’s admonition that ‘the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.’ Or, as an alter ego of the character Keyser Söze says in the film The Usual Suspects, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever played was to convince the world that he didn’t exist.’ The Devil. Racism. Another metaphor. Same difference.”

In other words: If we want to do something about racism (and move from white fragility to white antifragility), it’s time to stop pretending our whiteness doesn’t exist.

White fragility.

After years of encountering it in her work as a diversity trainer, that’s the phrase Robin uses to explain the “knee-jerk defensiveness about any suggestion that being white had any meaning and a refusal to acknowledge any advantages of being white.”

So… How do we go from being fragile to resilient to antifragile when it comes to race? We need to “build our stamina.” Note: THAT phrase (to “build our stamina”) might just be the most-often repeated one throughout the book. (Every time I underlined it I thought of Phil Stutz and his wisdom about “emotional stamina” and our adaptation to antifragile confidence.)

As Robin says: “A critical component of cross-racial skill building is the ability to sit with the discomfort of being seen racially, of having to proceed as if our race matters (which it does). Being seen racially is a common trigger of white fragility, and thus, to build our stamina, white people must face the first challenge: naming our race.”

Robin tells us that we have a problem identifying with our race (and racism) for a number of reasons. The biggest issue might be the fact that we DEFINE racism incorrectly—we think that any potential racist tendencies we may have (and we all have them) mean that something’s wrong with us as individuals vs. our society as a whole. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.

She tells us that part of the problem is that “we don’t understand socialization,” how it affects our experience as white people and that we are overly vested in “the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, narrow and repetitive media representations of people of color, segregation in schools and neighborhoods, depictions of whiteness as the human ideal, truncated history, jokes and warnings, taboos on openly talking about race and white solidarity.”

Welcome to Chapter #1: “The Challenges of Talking to White People About Racism.”

I think this might just be the biggest obstacle to addressing race issues (and racism) Wisely and Courageously: We’re working with the wrong definition and conception of what racism is.

In fact, Robin dedicates a whole chapter to the subject. It’s called “The Good/Bad Binary.” In that chapter she tells us: “The simplistic idea that racism is limited to individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic. To move beyond defensiveness, we have to let go of this common belief.”

The “simplistic” perspective of racism? We tend to think of racism as an “act” by a “racist” person. When we hold that overly-simplistic perspective, we respond to any hint that WE (gasp) may be complicit in racism with the fragile defensiveness that is the theme of this book.

What Robin and her colleagues have dedicated their lives to helping us understand is that racism is MUCH (!!!) more nuanced and complicated than that.

As Robin tells us: “When a racial group’s collective prejudice is backed by the power of legal authority and institutional control, it is transformed into racism, a far-reaching system that functions independently from the intentions or self-images of individual actors. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, ‘Racism is a structure, not an event.'”

We, as white people, need to humbly step back from our insulated bubble, realize that we have benefited greatly from a society structured to favor white people and then figure out how we can do something constructive in the face of the enormous challenges we collectively face.

P.S. Remember how Robin told us that she thinks “progressive white people” are the biggest impediments to dealing with racism? Why is that? Well, as with all these topics that need a much longer discussion than we can have in this Note, she tells us that pretending that we’re “color blind” (e.g., that “we don’t see color in people”) or “color celebrants” (e.g., “we have a lot of friends of color,” therefore we couldn’t possibly be racist) isn’t helpful.

Why is that? Again: “Racism is a structure, not an event.”

As hard as it is to accept, being white in our modern society makes us complicit. Period. And, again, rather than be FRAGILE about it, we can humbly accept the opportunity to learn more about what we can do about it.

That’s from the final chapter “Where Do We Go from Here?”

If I had a criticism of the book, it would be that I wish it had a LOT more constructive action steps we can take beyond recognizing our fragility.

Having said that, the reality is that a) the recommendations in that paragraph alone are enough to keep us busy for multiple lifetimes; and, b) to be fair, Robin explicitly tells us that “This book does not attempt to provide a solution to racism. … My goal is to make visible how one aspect of white sensibility continues to hold racism in place: white fragility.”

Although I think she achieved her goal and I know she addresses this common question regarding what we can do in her foreword to Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy, I still wish there was a second half to the book (and/or a whole ‘nother book) on how we can earnestly take steps to become ANTIFRAGILE. Something along the lines of: White Antifragility: How White People Can Take Action to Help Conquer Racism.

Knowing that this is one of the most complex challenges facing humanity, let’s get busy doing the hard work of opening our eyes to racism as we show up humbly, honestly and powerfully.

Today. And for the rest of our lives.