Cissy's note; Every time I get annoyed that more men are not leading conversations about sexual violence, sexism or are saying defensive or disparaging things about the #MeToo movement, I check myself. I ask myself how much I've been talking, sharing, learning, and challenging myself about racial bias and my own white advantage. It's never enough. Can I really expect people to be better than I am doing? Can I hope people will challenge their own assumptions, culture, experiences and advantages if I'm not willing to do so?
I'm trying to criticize others less and challenge myself more. I'm trying to focus on the person I have biggest influence over - myself. I share this post today because, at times I do feel my own white fragility, I do worry about saying anything at all because it might show or reveal how much I still don't know, see, realize. I do get defensive at times and flinch and cringe and worry. Like in this piece where the author talked about a white woman talking over people at meetings and how that's not just a personality trait and how that can be silencing to people of color. I see myself in that. And most of the time, I see myself as speaking up as one who has been silenced but don't think if I'm silencing... So, let's keep learning. Please share what you're learning, realizing, and reading and how you keep growing and challenging yourself to keep learning and how you help change systems and yourself.)
Excerpt from writing by Robin DiAngelo pubished in Medium. DiAngelo is the author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism.
Despite its ubiquity, white superiority is also unnamed and denied by most whites. If we become adults who explicitly oppose racism, as do many, we often organize our identity around a denial of our racially based privileges that reinforce racist disadvantage for others. What is particularly problematic about this contradiction is that white people’s moral objection to racism increases their resistance to acknowledging complicity with it. In a white supremacist context, white identity largely rests on a foundation of (superficial) racial tolerance and acceptance. We whites who position ourselves as liberal often opt to protect what we perceive as our moral reputations, rather than recognize or change our participation in systems of inequity and domination.
One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked. Whites who describe the interactions this way are responding to the articulation of counternarratives alone; no physical violence has ever occurred in any interracial discussion or training that I am aware of. These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions. The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous. The self-defense approach also reinscribes racist imagery. By positioning themselves as the victim of anti-racist efforts, they cannot be the beneficiaries of whiteness. Claiming that it is they who have been unfairly treated — through a challenge to their position or an expectation that they listen to the perspectives and experiences of people of color — they can demand that more social resources (such as time and attention) be channeled in their direction to help them cope with this mistreatment.
Comments (5)