Within the last week we have a Fox News host start crying on the air when talking about race, saying it made her "uncomfortable," along with the Pima County Board of Supervisor Ally Miller who declared that she is "WHITE and proud" and not going to apologize last Saturday in the aftermath of the White Supremacy rally that left three dead.
Do these two women exhibit symptoms of "White Fragility?"
The following is a short excerpt of The Sugarcoated Language Of White Fragility by Anna Kegler.
Fox News host Mellisa Francis brought to tears for the "uncomfortable" talk on race.[/caption]
I am writing this piece with the understanding that some White people will be more likely to listen to me because I am White. This is part of the underlying problem of White Fragility. White Fragility is the thing that restricts our knowledge, shuts down conversations before they start, and invites us to lie to ourselves. I’ll get into it more in the next section.
Finally, while I do want to nerd out a little dissecting some of the words we use, this piece is not about proposing new language. Our language is just a symptom. The underlying White Fragility is the problem we need to fix.
White Fragility: Living in a Bubble and Also Being in Everyone’s Business
Dr. Robin DiAngelo, a White critical racial and social justice educator who created the term “White Fragility,” breaks it down like this:
White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.
Here is a list of things that cause White people racial stress, and why:
As an illustration of the above, let’s look at Donald Trump.
Trump is known for speaking in vague generalities and declaring simplistic solutions for complex problems. He avoids policy and fact-based conversations, and gets angry and disgusted at the drop of a hat. Now imagine that when it comes to conversations on race, White people in America act a lot like Donald Trump. We generally lack knowledge, but we always have an opinion. We lack the skill set for nuanced conversations, so we pretend they aren’t necessary. When we can’t avoid, we deflect, or we get upset. We’re thin-skinned.
There are a lot of reasons White people have such a low threshold for discomfort. For one, we tend to lead segregated lives, and we think of ourselves as individuals as opposed to members of a group. We receive constant messages that Whiteness is valuable, and we’re used to feeling a sense of belonging in most spaces. All of this leads to a huge sense of entitlement to being not only comfortable, but correct, at all times. And even once we get exposed to the existence of these dynamics, we are often at a loss as to how to talk about it. We do everything to avoid talking about race in any real way, including saying nonsense like “Mohammad Ali transcended race” when we really mean “was retroactively deemed safe by fragile white people.”
Linguistic Tricks to Outsmart Racial Stress Triggers
Terms like “inclusion” and “white privilege” are designed to sneak past the racial stress triggers of White Fragility. They center Whiteness in a way that makes White people comfortable, while deflecting from the stressful realities of the racist harm that Whiteness causes. Imagine how many racial stress trigger alarm bells would go off if we were using words like “discrimination awareness” and “white undeserved advantages” instead...
Read the rest here.