So I Finally Read White Fragility
Jul. 3rd, 2020 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitIt's very... academic.
No, really, *very* academic. Has sentences like "My psychosocial development was inculcated in a white supremacist culture in which I am the superior group" level academic. (The whole book is like that.) I've been steeping in discourse and I frequently had trouble following it. In fact, I was frequently only following it because it's not saying anything other than Racism 101, nothing that a hundred other resources out there don't say in far easier language. Like, it really does seem like she said "Let's take Racism 101 and say it in the most abstruse language possible!" The actual definition of "white fragility" seems to be "that defensiveness white people have when someone brings up race", and people have been talking about that for a long time before Robin DiAngelo came up with a catchy name for it that people can use to hit each other with in their Woker-Than-Thou discussions. Sure, later on in the book she defines it thusly: "White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people's socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy." But all of the examples of it that she gives on a *practical* level? Are defensiveness or whining.
It's also not very practical. She spends a lot of time talking about societal constructs and interrogating your feelings and does not present any sort of things you should actually be *doing* once you interrogate your feelings-- and the part where she says that if you're not talking about race with your friends of color they probably don't trust you to handle it *really* needs to have a section about whether and how to address that with them in a way that doesn't end in dramatically going up to them and being like "You know I'm not RACIST, right?" (Yes, near the end there's a little about this, but it's a hundred pages later and in very impractical language.) Towards the end of the book she gets into the practicalities of running an anti-racist workshop, and a lot of the things she says there makes me think the reason she has so many stories of people angrily challenging her is that she's bad at running workshops, specifically in the "acting like the world is as it should be rather than as it is" sense-- yes, people *should* respond to antiracism training in certain ways, but since they don't, you as the trainer need to structure your training to try to account for that.
(Nor does she at any point *define* what an "authentic cross-racial relationship" is, though she does note that they're good and we should have them. I think I've just found yet another context in which I'm wary of the word "authentic.")
Also she spends a *lot* of time being like "White people do things in this way, which is bad. This is how I do things, which is the Correct way to do them." She is, I will note, also a white person, and she does not ever give examples of *other* white people behaving in the Correct way, nor does she give more than one example of herself making a mistake-- and that example is given to show off the very elaborated self-flagellation she does by way of apologizing for it.
I actually don't think I agree with the people who think it exists solely to promote anti-racism corporate training; she spends more than half the book wandering through heavy academia and only starts getting into corporate anti-racism training at the end-- most of the really egregious stuff comes from the last few chapters; while the first several have occasional digressions into WTF they're mostly just "none of this is innovative or new and you could have used SO MANY FEWER words."
While I've yet to read "Waking Up White", I have seen seen its author speak and I suspect it will be much better if you're looking for "white woman talks about coming to terms with your participation in structural racism" books. Or you could go check out one of the many lists of "read these Black authors instead of reading White Fragility" that have been circulating.
(As a tangential aside: I am *deeply distrustful* of the "this will make you uncomfortable, in fact feeling uncomfortable is desirable; that's how you know it's working" discourse that's common in a lot of dismantling-your-privilege work and heavily emphasized here, because while yes, doing it right often will make you uncomfortable, there really needs to be some sort of way of getting across to neophytes, standard when that is brought up, about the difference between "uncomfortable because it's breaking down your stereotypes" and "uncomfortable because someone is using social justice lingo to promote terrible things." I do not want people assimilating the idea that to be enlightened they have to accept all the discomfort from anyone who proclaims it's in the service of the cause; that's how you get cults.)
No, really, *very* academic. Has sentences like "My psychosocial development was inculcated in a white supremacist culture in which I am the superior group" level academic. (The whole book is like that.) I've been steeping in discourse and I frequently had trouble following it. In fact, I was frequently only following it because it's not saying anything other than Racism 101, nothing that a hundred other resources out there don't say in far easier language. Like, it really does seem like she said "Let's take Racism 101 and say it in the most abstruse language possible!" The actual definition of "white fragility" seems to be "that defensiveness white people have when someone brings up race", and people have been talking about that for a long time before Robin DiAngelo came up with a catchy name for it that people can use to hit each other with in their Woker-Than-Thou discussions. Sure, later on in the book she defines it thusly: "White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people's socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy." But all of the examples of it that she gives on a *practical* level? Are defensiveness or whining.
It's also not very practical. She spends a lot of time talking about societal constructs and interrogating your feelings and does not present any sort of things you should actually be *doing* once you interrogate your feelings-- and the part where she says that if you're not talking about race with your friends of color they probably don't trust you to handle it *really* needs to have a section about whether and how to address that with them in a way that doesn't end in dramatically going up to them and being like "You know I'm not RACIST, right?" (Yes, near the end there's a little about this, but it's a hundred pages later and in very impractical language.) Towards the end of the book she gets into the practicalities of running an anti-racist workshop, and a lot of the things she says there makes me think the reason she has so many stories of people angrily challenging her is that she's bad at running workshops, specifically in the "acting like the world is as it should be rather than as it is" sense-- yes, people *should* respond to antiracism training in certain ways, but since they don't, you as the trainer need to structure your training to try to account for that.
(Nor does she at any point *define* what an "authentic cross-racial relationship" is, though she does note that they're good and we should have them. I think I've just found yet another context in which I'm wary of the word "authentic.")
Also she spends a *lot* of time being like "White people do things in this way, which is bad. This is how I do things, which is the Correct way to do them." She is, I will note, also a white person, and she does not ever give examples of *other* white people behaving in the Correct way, nor does she give more than one example of herself making a mistake-- and that example is given to show off the very elaborated self-flagellation she does by way of apologizing for it.
I actually don't think I agree with the people who think it exists solely to promote anti-racism corporate training; she spends more than half the book wandering through heavy academia and only starts getting into corporate anti-racism training at the end-- most of the really egregious stuff comes from the last few chapters; while the first several have occasional digressions into WTF they're mostly just "none of this is innovative or new and you could have used SO MANY FEWER words."
While I've yet to read "Waking Up White", I have seen seen its author speak and I suspect it will be much better if you're looking for "white woman talks about coming to terms with your participation in structural racism" books. Or you could go check out one of the many lists of "read these Black authors instead of reading White Fragility" that have been circulating.
(As a tangential aside: I am *deeply distrustful* of the "this will make you uncomfortable, in fact feeling uncomfortable is desirable; that's how you know it's working" discourse that's common in a lot of dismantling-your-privilege work and heavily emphasized here, because while yes, doing it right often will make you uncomfortable, there really needs to be some sort of way of getting across to neophytes, standard when that is brought up, about the difference between "uncomfortable because it's breaking down your stereotypes" and "uncomfortable because someone is using social justice lingo to promote terrible things." I do not want people assimilating the idea that to be enlightened they have to accept all the discomfort from anyone who proclaims it's in the service of the cause; that's how you get cults.)
no subject
Date: 2020-07-04 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-05 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-05 04:08 am (UTC)(Also, hi! I have been reading your Tumblr with much admiration and so am now having this moment of "staranise liked my thing! *gasp* *blush*")
no subject
Date: 2020-07-08 05:44 pm (UTC)Yaas. I've been trying very hard to focus on seriously Listening, rather than centering myself.
We actually had a really great presentation at an all-hands at work a few weeks ago. They brought in a (black) psychologist who specializes in this sort of stuff: she dug deeply into the psychology of racism, right down to the cognitive-science level, to illustrate the way that humans group "us" vs. "them". She then went on to clarify the point that yes, this is uncomfortable. That's because change -- that is to say, cognitive dissonance -- *is* uncomfortable. But it's how you learn.
It was maybe half an hour; from the sound of things, it probably had more useful content than the book does...