WHITE FRAGILITY

The book WHITE FRAGILITY describes the response of many Caucasian (from now on WHITE) Americans when accused of being racist.  The book describes a syndrome of denial and rejection in individuals who consider themselves to be "liberal minded" and support the rights of minorities.  Published in 2020,  the author has been lecturing and training on this topic for several years with organizations seeking to improve their relationships with minorities.  She is professor in social work at the U of Washington. (https://www.robindiangelo.com/about-me/).  

The book is troubling to many WHITE readers who perceive themselves to be supportive of minorities, particularly toward African-Americans (AA), and their denial becomes the symptom of the problem, at least according to diAngelo.  The book poses an interesting dichotomy: Racists are people who are prejudiced against AA and readily state this, sometimes indirectly (they are inferior, and therefore don't deserve, etc..). Deniers ("fragile whites") are WHITE people who claim to be unprejudiced because they don't perceive their own biases.  And then perhaps there is a third group of positive-prejudiced (PP) who recognize they are prejudiced and try to avoid being unfair.  They are distinguished from racists who use their prejudice to justify hostile acts against AA,  but it is not entirely clear how they are distinguished from deniers.  If a denier admits to some feelings of prejudice do they cease being a denier?  If a PP makes a decision that does not favor an AA, is that evidence that they are not a full PP?  And who makes these decisions?  

DiAngelo gives workshops and trainings which claim to help WHITE people who are "white fragility" PP to recognize themselves and begin to adjust their perceptions.  But what if they disagree?  Are they wrong or is diAngelo?  Who decides?  It seems that her contention is that all WHITES have "white fragility" and there are really no PP,  so the answer is simple. But is it?  Is that so?  According to....?

Regardless of her thesis, and whether it has any validity (in what sense?),  the book raises a valuable question about the difficulties in considering minorities within a society.  Those who remember the 1960s Civil Rights Era will recall that President Kennedy was reluctantly pressing the Southern States to integrate their schools,  while his home city of Boston had almost total segregation, not by law but by geographic district boundaries.  Southern Governors were certainly acknowledged Racists, but Kennedy and his initiative reflected his PP that southern schools were segregated,  but not Boston's.  There are many other examples one might cite, which continue to the present.

The  labor necessary to develop the United States,  including construction of major buildings and the capitol in DC, farming plantations in the Southern US,  and construction of the railroads, and agricultural development and mining in the West--- all depended on slave labor, or very poorly compensated, near slave labor.  One group of persons exploited another group using them to perform arduous labor. (If anyone contests this, they are none of the above categories,  just uninformed.)  The question is whether this exploitation is justified by the inferiority of the group (Racist), or it happened and was unfortunate, but I didn't do it, PP, or it happened,  somebody's ancestors did it, and it is unclear how to "accommodate" it in the present.  Perhaps the stupidest response is tearing down monuments.  The monuments of exploitation, both the Civil War monuments,  and the golden spike of Promontory Point,  are the evidence of the past, and tearing them down only obscures the reality and allows future generations to deny it.  Monuments of exploitation should be modified to acknowledge the full historical significance.  (The great honor of the golden spike at Promontory Point joining the two railroad constructions and linking the country did not mention the horrible conditions and danger of Chinese laborers from the West, or the blacks, both free and slave, who worked from the East ("John Henry he could hammer..."). 

The broader question is the issue of rewriting the national history.  At no time in my education,  was I taught that slaves played a role in my home state of Penna.  Nor was I told of the complex role of Native Americans  trying to play off the British and French to protect their homelands.  My college history (the little I studied) was Euro-centric, and never mentioned that there were ancient civilizations in Mexico and the Western US because their evidence was archeology,  not written texts.  Interesting.

The United States in which we live is a far more complex cultural soup than any of our current educational formulations.  A thorough multicultural history of the US does not exist.  The great interest Liberals showed in Lepore's THESE TRUTHS is entirely based on her formulation of the factors producing the current unrest in the country; the book never mentions the Spanish mission history, the role of Chinese Labor in building the railroad and other labor from the West, or the complex economic and political history of the settlement of the West.  The oil industry gets one reference related to the Nixon campaign!  The 792 text pages are an obsessional view of the importance of Washington, DC and the people in it,  the documents it produced over time,  and the well known historical events that have left a scar in the culture.  The other events and complex history, most of it outside of DC,  are never mentioned.  Her long analysis of FDR and the importance of his use of radio, does not mention the Golden Gate Bridge, or Hoover Dam, two of the great accomplishments that have changed the West and the country.  A historian who writes a history of documents, and an interpretation of how they influence the country should be evaluated as such, not credited with a broad analysis of the factors that influence the country.

The conflicts going on the schools reflect this confusion.  What history of the US should children learn?  The history of Ohio?  Of Mississippi?  Should every school teach important details of the history of each state?  Who decides the important details?  Where was all the Liberal outrage about the poor quality of education about AA in the 1990s?  How has it suddenly been discovered?  Which other minorities are launching similar campaigns to get their history and role in the country appreciated?  (How many people know the history behind John Ford's movie "The Searchers"? Read "Empire of the Summer Moon").

The point is that every political entity tries to formulate a "consensus consciousness" (Tart) about the people, places, and events that are the unifying features of the culture. (Monarchs are useful tools, as illustrated by the recent death of the queen.)  This consensus is breaking down in the US today,  and a different consensus will be formed probably using social media and other new forms of communication.  (It won't come by radio, despite the influence of certain radio personalities.)

The stupid thing about "White Fragility" is its attempt to reformulate one narrow perspective of a certain group without considering the broader context in which it occurs.  The positive aspect of "White Fragility" is that it points out that everyone, in every group, has perspectives influenced by their group experience,  and forming an integrative "country story" will be a long and complex process.  No one group is entitled to be the scribe of the "actual" history of the US, though this seemed to be the case for more than a century.