The aim to critically confront Robin DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ does not stem from the urge to regurgitate Ben Shapiro talking points about the relativity of white privilege and white fragility in contemporary society. On my part, there is no intrinsic urge to invalidate the presence of these heinous social phenomena. Moreover, I aim for a radical reorientation, of anti-racist education, praxis, and vigilant awareness regarding the pervasive nature of contemporary institutionalized racism. If we are to frame anti-racist practice as some industrialized notion of work purely centered around the dichotomy of ‘woke’ white people aiming to allow Black Americans access into predominantly white spaces, than we are sorely misguided. This is not about what Black Americans and the people of Africa deserve, they deserve the world after the last 400 years. This is about fully acknowledging the context of where we have arrived in 2020. Long before white Europeans grasped the potential to exploit the African continent for its vast assortment of valuable land and elements: Africa was a land with its own economic autonomy, holistic systems of medical treatment, systems of spirituality, and altogether a thriving society with Kings and Queens not rooted in patriarchy. However, we need to acknowledge how African history has been erased and how the erasure of African history props up latent white supremacist arguments propagated by books like ‘White Fragility’. If we center the conversation around ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘integration’ we inherently degrade the pan-African movement towards true economic and bodily autonomy under the guise of good intentions. This occurs through white people centering their anti-racist responsibility on this guiding question: “How can we aim to allow Black people more access, freedom, and right to their own sovereignty within our predominantly white institutions?” Do you see the problem? Most people maintain awareness on the history of colonial exploitation in this country. However, how we engage that awareness distinguishes and divides our people. If white people claim they are for the liberation of black people in America and abroad we need to increase our capacity of awareness to understand that economic autonomy needs to be the base line through which this movement materializes; moreover, not grappling with the dogmatic, pathological phenomena of white people refusing to engage in discourse about race in America. It is not my aim to denounce the legitimacy of talking about race and the history of institutionalized racism in this country, because this is important too. However, I notice that white people want to make this the baseline through which the movement to liberate black lives exists. The discursive aim to liberate black lives needs to be employed in a supplementary sense: meaning, if white people want to make it their work to fight racism they should use their institutional power to instill anti-racist systems of thought and policy within their most powerful public and private institutions. Perhaps my favorite part of DiAngelo’s discussion arrives when she confronts the investment white people have in race, universality, individuality, and othering. It is my wish that she expounds upon this more because this is the nexus through which institutional racism exists. Instead, she chooses to discursively engage the pathology behind why contemporary white Americans veer from discussions of race-based conflict. This is harmful because it centers the conversation, not necessarily around justifying racism, but around the mental gymnastics that white people go through to navigate their own internal complicity and racism. White Europeans saw the black body, the element rich African continent, the land rich American continent and decided to capitalize with violence and subjugation. Thus, erasing an entire developed nation built up on different values than their own. White people need to begin to grasp the validity of employing a praxis of economic autonomy for black people in America, not economic austerity. White people cannot take it upon themselves to lead the charge in the economic and social liberation of black people in America and abroad, we must follow the needs of those whom we have oppressed for 400+ years, black people. It is always important to speak out against racism whenever it is seen, wherever it is seen, however, to suggest that anti-racist praxis starts on the level of the individual can degrade the movement towards liberating black bodies in America and across the globe. In a society with blood clots of wealth and institutional power even more stratified than the gilded age, how can we maintain that anti-racism needs to start on a micro-scale? If white people want to center the conflict of race in America around themselves, we should be figuring out how to employ our institutional privileges granted by the visceral nature of the flesh to help black people build their own nation. Fear halts this process through its grip on the sub-conscious reality that all white people rely on their proximity to their whitened institutions that grant them the privilege to pursue a life on the backs of racist, colonial exploitation. In engaging anti-racist education DiAngelo explains that it is more useful to “start at the micro level of analysis, and move to the macro, from the individual out to the interpersonal, societal and institutional. Starting with the individual and moving outward to the ultimate framework for racism — Whiteness — allows for the pacing that is necessary for many white people for approaching the challenging study of race. In this way, a discourse on Whiteness becomes part of a process rather than an event” (DiAngelo 67, White Fragility). This progression lays the foundations of DiAngelo’s argument. An argument that acknowledges the pitfalls on whiteness and individualized notions of engaging anti-racism, but simultaneously reaffirms them. White people cannot be scared of listening to the needs of Black and African people.
Everybody is fallible under a system that exploits bodies and land in order to ensure comfort and security for a few. It is our responsibility to not succumb to the white urge to formulate a one-size fits all guide to addressing racism and engaging anti-racist education. All white people have different starting points regarding their awareness to the pervasiveness of white supremacy and institutionalized racism in this country. What we cannot do is center our anti-racist educational processes around our own pathology and intrinsic desire to ‘do the work’ regarding engaging the phenomena of racial and colonial exploitation.
I hope to write a follow up piece to this argument soon, where I will specifically engage how it ought to be our moral obligation as white people to redeem ourselves for how we have seen, perceived, and engaged with the African continent, and with Black American autonomy for millenniums. I will engage this argument with the supplemental help of several black authors, who have been making these arguments for years. For white people, at this conclusive point I would like to lodge three replacement books in your anti-racist repertoire that are essential in learning and unlearning internalized racism.
‘The New Jim Crow’ By Michelle Alexander
‘The Wretched of the Earth’ By Frantz Fanon
‘Woman, Race and Class’ By Angela Davis
