David Michael Miller
There are many lessons to be learned from #TheRealUW: The overwhelming stresses blacks, Latinos and American Indians have to endure just to get to an education, and the mind-numbing racism still evinced by some 18- to 20-year-olds in the year 2016.
Most of all, it shows how endemic white fragility is to the Wisconsin experience. Of all the terms I’ve learned over the last few years, “white fragility” is one of my favorites. It is a term coined by Robin DiAngelo, a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University. In an article in the National Journal of Critical Pedagogy, DiAngelo defined white fragility as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include outward display of emotions such as anger, fear and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”
A recent presentation titled “Wake Up, Wisconsin: Disrupting the Narrative of the Mindfulness Movement on Our Campus and in Our Communities” by Dr. Angela Rose Black, a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Madison, reminded me just how prevalent white fragility is throughout all of Madison and the state of Wisconsin as a whole. The UW-Madison campus is not excluded from this.
Even if you are unfamiliar with the term, you’ve seen white fragility many times before. It’s the white guy who pops up on a Facebook thread to remind people that he didn’t have white privilege because he grew up poor. It’s the white woman who acknowledges that she has had privilege and that is racism is alive and persistent — but is uncomfortable with scholarships that might just take race into account.
White fragility is closing the browser tab full of #TheRealUW tweets because it gets too awful to keep reading. Which is something I did. Because I, as a white guy, have the privilege to not think about race for a while when it gets too stressful for me. I can do the same thing with sexism, homophobia, transphobia and a half dozen other things.
White fragility is when white people let shame replace action. When a white person feels guilty after reading the Race to Equity report or a chart showing incarceration disparities, a common response is to shut down. It’s a natural response, but it remains a harmful one. White people can’t remain passive but they also have to let communities of color take the lead. I know that can feel foreign. As a white American male, I’ve had 30 years’ worth of cartoons, comic books, movies and history textbooks tell me I’m supposed to be the leader, other groups are supposed to be the sidekicks. But letting go of auto white dominance is a form of liberation for white people too.
A close relative of white fragility is white solidarity, Once again, a natural response, if not the correct one. When a member of a tribe we identify with is attacked, we get defensive. When #TheRealUW blew up online, I saw white people posting comments like, “well, these are isolated incidents” and “most white people aren’t like that,” or even the good ol’ classic, “that doesn’t seem that racist to me.”
I’d like to say that white fragility and white solidarity are concepts held exclusively by young, white UW students coming in from rural areas and segregated suburbs who have never been in contact with much diversity, but that’s not true. These concepts show themselves at weird times, often when white people least expect it.
My white fragility kicks in as soon as people start an open discussion of religion. As a white, liberal person living in the northern U.S., most of my circles involve people who don’t talk about their faith. A majority of my relatives and close friends, including the ones of color, range from agnostic to ambivalent. Those who do follow a religion don’t talk about it openly.
When I’ve worked with a community of color and religion came up, I found myself trying to steer the discussion away from matters of faith as quickly as possible. To me, it felt like an effort to get back to a place of common dialogue. Heck, I may have even justified it as saying I was trying to make things more equal by making sure the non-Christians in the room didn’t feel excluded. After all, there are plenty of black and Latino nonbelievers. But, at the core of my actions, I was saying that my truth was greater than their truth.
That’s the thing about white privilege, why it always remains a threat. As white people, we can be good people dedicating much of our lives to making our community a less disparate place, but when a threat we are barely conscious of kicks our white fragility into action, we reinforce the very dominant power structures we try to fight against.
To me, that’s the main takeaway from #TheRealUW: Threatened groups in positions of power showing off their power. It doesn’t matter if it’s a loosening of the tongue via alcohol, thoughtless statements that reinforce stereotypes or very thought-out statements by privileged assholes — they all remind underrepresented communities of color that this isn’t their space.
This post isn’t meant to be some “white people sure are the worst” screed. What I’m trying to show is how power structures trap white people too — with the full admission that it is unfathomably nicer to be trapped on the side of the fence with good schools, more job opportunities and a lower risk of being shot by cops.
#TheRealUW reminds us how much farther white people in Wisconsin have to go before we can actually have a campus and a community we can be fully proud of.
