White Fragility

White Fragility will help you take steps toward becoming a kinder and more fair person by helping you understand why it’s so difficult for white people, especially in America, to talk about racism.

At its core, white fragility denies and misunderstands the nature of racism and race. This reinforces inequality and makes it difficult to resolve. To start breaking it down, we need to understand racism, which means we’ve got to understand race.

Race is not a genetic fact. It’s not the most intuitive truth because of the physical differences we see between races. But when you get down to the science of genetics, this assumption falls apart.

The reality is, people made up race. It’s a social construct, which means it guides the way people think and act. It makes us treat some groups of people in specific ways. But where did this all start?

The founders of the United States attempted to build the country on equality, or their idea of what that meant. But their view of the world included the social construct of race, which they built into the US constitution for their benefit.

They justified this with “race science,” which isn’t actually science at all but rather the idea that some groups of people are inferior to others. In this case, it was African Americans that were inferior to those of European descent.

This let white people prevent blacks from rising up and taking their status and let them keep blacks enslaved. For centuries this gross misunderstanding has perpetuated into the fabric of society without ever being addressed. Until now.

Although I didn’t know it growing up, I have a lot of what I now know is white privilege. I could get defensive about this and think about how I didn’t always have it so easy, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about the advantages that other white people and I have just because we’re white that people of color do not. If you need evidence just pay attention to the sense of belonging that our culture gives to white people. Everywhere you look, whether in movies, leadership, authors, or elsewhere, the people are predominantly white. This paints the picture of America as a predominantly white society and sends the implied message that white people belong here. And that people of color don’t. Consider also the idea of crime. In the media, we see black and Latino people depicted as having an association with crime. This perpetuates into people’s minds, and research confirms that white people consider a neighborhood’s crime levels to be connected with how many people of color live there. What’s worse is that police and judges are also likely to…