Saturday Special: White Women And Oppression Redux
I know I said the miniseries was completed, but Ally keeps posting, and I keep responding, this time on the concept of fragility.
For your ease my comment is below.
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To my mind, there’s more than one thing that gets lumped into the compost pile that is fragility.
One is straight up violence. Fragility is often used as a cover for exactly that. Regardless of what triggered it.
The second is the psychology. It takes a lot to maintain the scaffolding of white supremacy, and since it rests on absolutely nothing, it is easily shaken, which makes for more ad hoc scrambling to shore up a structure that needs to blown up.
That leads me to what we at LoR call the Myth of White Benevolence which is closely related to the above. White people really do believe their myths about themselves, buy into Southern Graciousness or Midwest nice, or PacNor quirky, and they don’t see that those personas can serve as cover for supremacy; when they’re punctured for what they are–passive aggressiveness, silencing, tone policing, detached intellectualism, they retreat to tropes and schemas and what has worked for them before; see the above paragraph.
I used to think most of it was unconscious. Now, not so much.
I see fragility as a tactic, part of a larger strategy of avoiding accountability and maintaining a fragile sense of self and place in the world, and doing so by any means necessary.
I also see it as primitive, as in primitive defenses. White people have never had to grow up, never had to practice emotional regulation, never had to deal with us mano y mano as adults. They project that onto us, calling us pathological, immature, dangerous, unable to reason, even as they display those very same behaviors.
I have been thinking about this a long time, this fragility. What it means for white people, even-especially actually-, in racial justice spaces.
What it means is that it sets the tone and timbre, sets the pace and the depth, and sets an expiration date for discussions and dialog.
That needs to be named, confronted, and dismantled if white people are going to be able to even in small ways authentically show up for the people they say they stand with.
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Ally Henny, September 23, 2019
When white people get mad about black folks pointing out their racism, I assume that it’s either because they thought they could get away with it and are mad they got caught or because, at the root of it, they think themselves above being evaluated and critiqued by black people.
I know that I am being somewhat over simplistic, but I think that white fragility has two main sources: anger at being exposed and an unwillingness to take direction from people that whiteness seems as inferior.