White Fragility

Talking about white people as a group is important because it interrupts individualism. But talking about people of color as a group can be problematic because it collapses many racial groups into one generic category. This chapter, DiAngelo says, will explore anti-Black sentiment specifically. These feelings arise in white people when passing Black strangers on the streets, seeing stereotypical depictions in the media, and hearing warnings and jokes between white people.

Whiteness has always been predicated on Blackness—creating an “inferior” Black race simultaneously created the “superior” white race. Scholars have argued that white people project onto Black people the aspects that they don’t want to own in themselves: white masters of slaves described them as lazy, even as they did backbreaking work. Today, white people often depict Black people as dangerous, despite the fact that white people have perpetrated more violence against Black people.

White resentment endures about affirmative action. Black people have been discriminated against in hiring since the end of slavery. In the late 1960s, affirmative action was instituted to remedy this discrimination. There is a lot of misinformation about affirmative action: people commonly believe that Black people are given preferential treatment in hiring and that a specific number of people of color must be hired to fill a quota. But these beliefs are untrue: affirmative action is a tool to ensure that quality minority candidates are given the same employment opportunities, and there are no quotas.

Ironically, white women have been affirmative action’s greatest beneficiaries. No employer is required to hire an unqualified person of color, but employers (meaning state and governmental agencies; affirmative action doesn’t apply to private companies) must be able to articulate why they didn’t hire a qualified person of color. Affirmative action has been systematically chipped away at, and African Americans continue to be the most underrepresented group at the organizational leadership level. And yet white people still carry outrage at how unfair affirmative action has been to them.

Other research illustrates white people’s disdain for African American people, from the school-to-prison pipeline, to mass incarceration, to white flight. One can see anti-Black sentiment in rejoinders to Black Lives Matter, the justification of brutality towards Black children and adults, and the comparison of the “alt-right” movement with the Black Panther Party. One can see it in how society buries the trauma Black people have experienced historically by dehumanizing Black people. One sees it in the constant discussion of the white working class in the 2016 presidential election with no concern for the Black working class, who remain on the bottom of every social and economic measure.

DiAngelo believes that white people fundamentally hate Blackness because it reminds them that they are capable and guilty of perpetrating harm. White people thus justify Black people’s treatment through the beliefs that Black people are inherently undeserving. One sees this in the indignation at NFL players who kneel during the national anthem. One sees it in the outrage of the crowd of white progressives at a Bernie Sanders rally when they were asked to grant four and a half minutes of silence to honor Michael Brown, an unarmed black man shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

White people also use Black people to feel warm-hearted and noble, as in the “white savior narrative”—the idea that white people can “save” Black people through their kindness and generosity. DiAngelo uses the example of The Blind Side, a hugely popular movie from 2009. The film is based on the true story of the Tuohy family, who rescued Michael Oher from poverty and helped him go on to become an NFL player.

Although the movie was popular with white audiences, all of the Black characters reinforce negative racial stereotypes: Oher as a childlike gentle giant in poverty, his drug-addicted single mother with children from unknown fathers, an incompetent welfare worker, and the gang members in Oher’s crime-ridden neighborhood. The movie makes it clear that the only way Oher can be saved is through a white family’s benevolence and bravery. It further emphasizes that Oher is lacking in intellectual abilities, while his talent derives from “protective instinct.”

The film, told from the white perspective, reinforces the idea that white people are Black people’s saviors, and that individual Black people can overcome their circumstances with white people’s help. It also suggests that Black neighborhoods are inherently dangerous and criminal, and that virtually all Black people are poor, incompetent, and unqualified. The fact that the Tuohy’s are the “good whites” who deal with individual bad white people they encounter in other places also reinforces the good/bad binary.