Select language, opens an overlay

Comment

White Fragility

Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Community comment are the opinions of contributing users. These comment do not represent the opinions of Alameda County Library.
Oct 29, 2020AaronAardvark1940 rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
A month or two ago, I received a newsletter from my high school alumni association that had a personal column from the president of the association. She told how she was planning to go to my high school with the white kids in her neighborhood and was disappointed to find that she was assigned to a different, nearly all-Black high school. Her mother was a housekeeper for a family solidly in the assigned neighborhood for the school I attended, so she persuaded the family to allow her to use that address as her own. She was then assigned to my high school. This was in 1953, and I am sure there is nobody who misunderstands what this was all about. But the effect it had on me was to wonder who this association president was, because I knew there were very few Black students in my graduating class. My old yearbook showed that roughly 10% of my class was Black, so how could I have not known that? There was only one Black student in any of my classes and I knew he had a sister in the school and I was aware of one other Black student with whom I sometimes rode a bus to afterschool activities. Again, this is a situation that very few will fail to understand. All of this primed me for reading White Fragility. White fragility is not about weakness, it is largely a method of deflection from even suggestions of racism. The author is careful in her definition of racism and of its attributes and her discussion of race spends time on the origins of racial identity and on the way social ideals have been generated. On page 113 she offers that white fragility “…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.” One question she asks nagged at me; when is the first time I saw a Black person? As a rather introverted person, it is sometimes hard for me recognize that other people come into my orbit, so I could not answer. When I tell you that I know when my younger brother first did so, you will understand another reason for my inability to remember. His first exposure was as a two-year-old to the then first-run movie Song of the South. Returning to my high school experience mentioned above, I am reasonably sure that high school is the first time in my education that there were any Black students in any school I attended. White Fragility is written for a white audience and it certainly hit its mark in me. The author’s analysis of the reaction of a mother in the grocery store whose child points to a Black man helped me understand her thesis and I could think of several ways to use that in fighting racism. This book was valuable to me and helped me to better understand the underlying structure of racism. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. P.S. October 31 – after posting my comment, I read through numerous other comments about this book. Some of the negative comments were probably from people to whom they believe the author’s theory does not apply, because they “are not racist.” But one comment stated that one should read books by POC (the commenter’s term) and that reading this book by a white author is supporting white supremacy. I read Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison years ago, Manning Marable and Ta-Nehisi Coates more recently, and I don’t know how many in between. They gave me photographs of myself, each through his own filter. In those writings, I could see myself from the outside. But in WF, the writer got inside my own head. It was like viewing myself in a mirror. Each of us is searching and we find different paths to understanding and change. I have been involved in activist groups that ultimately accomplished very little because of the need to be “pure.” Read any magazine on the Left to see how we love to fight among ourselves about movement orthodoxy. In the words of Rodney King, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along?”