How Even Liberal Whites Make Themselves Out as Victims in Discussions of Racism
In reading White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo (from which I take all the quotations in this post except when noted otherwise), one of the things I found most fascinating was her accounts of her experiences it leading discussions about racism as part of her job as a diversity trainer. Below are some of her descriptions of her experience in that role. (Unless noted otherwise all the quotations in this post are from White Fragility.)
… if and when an educational program does directly address racism and the privileging of whites, common white responses include anger, withdrawal, emotional incapacitation, guilt, argumentation, and cognitive dissonance (all of which reinforce the pressure on facilitators to avoid directly addressing racism). So-called progressive whites may not respond with anger but still insulate themselves via claims that they are beyond the need for engaging with the content because they “already had a class on this” or “already know this.” All these responses constitute white fragility—the result of the reduced psychosocial stamina that racial insulation inculcates.
… intense emotional reactions are common. I have discussed several reasons why whites are so defensive about the suggestion that we benefit from, and are complicit in, a racist system:
Social taboos against talking openly about race
The racist = bad / not racist = good binary
Fear and resentment toward people of color
Our delusion that we are objective individuals
Our guilty knowledge that there is more going on than we can or will admit to
Deep investment in a system that benefits us and that we have been conditioned to see as fair
Internalized superiority and sense of a right to rule
A deep cultural legacy of anti-black sentiment
It is hard to grow up in our society as a white person without ingesting some of the pro-white, anti-black attitudes floating around in our culture.
To me, the most remarkable part of Robin DiAngelo’s accounts of her work as a diversity trainer is the way white people she is talking to try to turn themselves into victims:
One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked. Whites who describe the interactions in this way are responding to the articulation of counternarratives alone; no physical violence has ever occurred in any interracial discussion or training that I am aware of. These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions. The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous. The self-defense approach also reinscribes racist imagery. By positioning themselves as the victim of antiracist efforts, they cannot be the beneficiaries of whiteness. Claiming that it is they who have been unfairly treated—through a challenge to their position or an expectation that they listen to the perspectives and experiences of people of color—they can demand that more social resources (such as time and attention) be channeled in their direction to help them cope with this mistreatment.
When I consult with organizations that want me to help them recruit and retain a more diverse workforce, I am consistently warned that past efforts to address the lack of diversity have resulted in trauma for white employees. This is literally the term used to describe the impact of a brief and isolated workshop: trauma. This trauma has required years of avoiding the topic altogether, and although the business leaders feel they are ready to begin again, I am cautioned to proceed slowly and be careful. Of course, this white racial trauma in response to equity efforts has also ensured that the organization has remained overwhelmingly white.
The language of violence that many whites use to describe antiracist endeavors is not without significance, as it is another example of how white fragility distorts reality. By employing terms that connote physical abuse, whites tap into the classic story that people of color (particularly African Americans) are dangerous and violent. In so doing, whites distort the real direction of danger between whites and others. This history becomes profoundly minimized when whites claim they don’t feel safe or are under attack when they find themselves in the rare situation of merely talking about race with people of color. The use of this language of violence illustrates how fragile and ill-equipped most white people are to confront racial tensions, and their subsequent projection of this tension onto people of color.
Here, I am reminded of Shirzad Chamine’s description of the “Victim” defense mechanism:
Characteristics
If criticized or misunderstood, tend to withdraw, pout, and sulk.
Fairly dramatic and temperamental.
When things get tough, want to crumble and give up.
…
Thoughts
No one understands me.
Poor me.
Terrible things always happen to me.
…
I discuss Shirzad’s book Positive Intelligence in “On Human Potential.” Because of the damage defense mechanisms often do to the one using them, Shirzad calls them “saboteurs.” This is the Victim saboteur in action.
Though there is a lot of additional subtlety to what Robin DiAngelo is saying, one thing I find intriguing is the “tough love” attitude Robin DiAngelo has toward antiracism. We have to buck up and take the feedback that points out structures and attitudes that advantage whites.
Making oneself out out to be a victim is not the only way whites try to avoid confronting their role in perpetuating white privilege. Intellectualizing can be used to insulate one’s heart from seeing one’s own role in the system and one’s own pro-white, anti-black attitudes. For those of us to whom intellectualizing is a reflex, a key question from Robin can help separate out defensive intellectualization from productive intellectual inquiry. She writes:
In my work to unravel the dynamics of racism, I have found a question that never fails me. This question is not “Is this claim true, or is it false?”; we will never come to an agreement on a question that sets up an either/or dichotomy on something as sensitive as racism. Instead I ask, “How does this claim function in the conversation?”
Robin does a good job of pointing to evidence of our pro-white, anti-black attitudes and the various rationalizations through which we avoid feeling bad about our roles in perpetuating white privilege.
One good example of our either devaluing or not thinking about people of color is when we talk about “the good old days.” Robin:
As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.
The past was great for white people (and white men in particular) because their positions went largely unchallenged. In understanding the power of white fragility, we have to notice that the mere questioning of those positions triggered the white fragility that Trump capitalized on. There has been no actual loss of power for the white elite, who have always controlled our institutions and continue to do so by a very wide margin.
We are also often ignorant about things going on in the present. For me, and I hope for many others, the protests in the last few weeks have been a wake-up call.
To mention something minor compared to some of my other dimensions of ignorance, I say to my shame that I didn’t know what Juneteenth was until I googled it one day this past week. Let’s make sure that from now on all Americans know that there is a holiday to celebrate one of the best things that has happened in our history: the end of slavery.
In the last few weeks, my wife Gail and I have watched “13th,” “I Am Not Your Negro” (about James Baldwin) and “Selma.” Of those three movies, the documentary “13th” hit me the hardest. I had known abstractly about the rise of the “carceral state” that imprisons a hugely greater fraction of Americans than the fraction imprisoned in other liberal democracies. But the racist origins of the carceral state had not come home to me until I saw “13th.” To put bluntly a key moment in that documentary, Bill Clinton, to win reelection, felt he needed to campaign on law and order, which in our country, sadly, means a lot more than the dictionary definition of “law and order.” Rather, as a politician, if you want to promise in code to lock up a lot of African-Americans, you talk about “law and order.” If you wanted to talk about law and order in the dictionary sense, in a non-racist way, you would want to use another set of words. Bill Clinton then went on to preside over a huge expansion of the number of Americans in prison. Other presidents also presided over a rise, but numerically, the big expansion happened under Bill Clinton.
Robin DiAngelo reminds of some of the racial disparities in policing in 2020:
It has been well documented that blacks and Latinos are stopped by police more often than whites are for the same activities and that they receive harsher sentences than whites do for the same crimes. Research has also shown that a major reason for this racial disparity can be attributed to the beliefs held by judges and others about the cause of the criminal behavior. For example, the criminal behavior of white juveniles is often seen as caused by external factors—the youth comes from a single-parent home, is having a hard time right now, just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, or was bullied at school. Attributing the cause of the action to external factors lessens the person’s responsibility and classifies the person as a victim him or herself. But black and Latinx youth are not afforded this same compassion. When black and Latinx youth go before a judge, the cause of the crime is more often attributed to something internal to the person—the youth is naturally more prone to crime, is more animalistic, and has less capacity for remorse (similarly, a 2016 study found that half of a sample of medical students and residents believe that blacks feel less pain). Whites continually receive the benefit of the doubt not granted to people of color—our race alone helps establish our innocence.
Robin also points to how we perpetuate racism in ordinary social interactions. One way we perpetuate racism is by misrepresenting racism as less of an issue than it really is:
Today we have a cultural norm that insists we hide our racism from people of color and deny it among ourselves, but not that we actually challenge it. In fact, we are socially penalized for challenging racism.
I am often asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t. In some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow. The adaptations produce the same outcome (people of color are blocked from moving forward) but have been put in place by a dominant white society that won’t or can’t admit to its beliefs. This intransigence results in another pillar of white fragility: the refusal to know.
Another way we perpetuate racism is by being too cowardly to challenge overt racism when it appears. Robin gives the example of a racist joke told in an all-white group:
The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy. We do indeed risk censure and other penalties from our fellow whites. We might be accused of being politically correct or might be perceived as angry, humorless, combative, and not suited to go far in an organization. In my own life, these penalties have worked as a form of social coercion. Seeking to avoid conflict and wanting to be liked, I have chosen silence all too often.
Conversely, when I kept quiet about racism, I was rewarded with social capital such as being seen as fun, cooperative, and a team player. Notice that within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do. I can justify my silence by telling myself that at least I am not the one who made the joke and that therefore I am not at fault. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it. Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity.
People of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism, wherein we fail to hold each other accountable, to challenge racism when we see it, or to support people of color in the struggle for racial justice.
In my post “Enablers of White Supremacy,” I used the intentionally shocking phrase “white supremacy” both to emphasize the gravity of the state our society is in and to make the idea of institutional racism clear. Robin DiAngelo has a trenchant list of some of the more personal ways in which we become enablers of white supremacy:
In summary, our socialization engenders a common set of racial patterns. These patterns are the foundation of white fragility:
Preference for racial segregation, and a lack of a sense of loss about segregation
Lack of understanding about what racism is
Seeing ourselves as individuals, exempt from the forces of racial socialization
Failure to understand that we bring our group’s history with us, that history matters • Assuming everyone is having or can have our experience
Lack of racial humility, and unwillingness to listen
Dismissing what we don’t understand
Lack of authentic interest in the perspectives of people of color
Wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to “solutions”
Confusing disagreement with not understanding
Need to maintain white solidarity, to save face, to look good
Guilt that paralyzes or allows inaction
Defensiveness about any suggestion that we are connected to racism
A focus on intentions over impact
Conclusion
It is time for all of us to heed the wake-up call of how far we still are from racial equality in America.
If you want one more sign of racism and other bad attitudes that resemble racism, see “‘Keep the Riffraff Out!’” In particular, almost always, when people talk about “preserving the character of their neighborhood” by blocking the construction of apartment buildings and multifamily homes, or homes on small lots, there is a racist effect, whatever you think about whether or not there is an out-and-out racist motivation. And what are, by any standard, out-and-out racist motivations are not at all uncommon when people talk about “preserving the character of their neighborhood.” Being in favor of more residential construction—a lot more, so the supply reaches to people of even modest means—wherever people want to live is one of the more powerful ways of being antiracist.
Finally, let me say that there is more than one way to be effective as an antiracist. What we need now is to get wide agreement on the gravity of the continuing problem of racism and to have a critical mass of people working to fight racism in different ways. Some of those ways of fighting racism have increasing returns to scale, so it can often be useful to join with others and follow antiracist leaders. But there are other ways of fighting racism that may work well even on a small scale. Find your own métier in this fight. But don’t stand on the sidelines.
Don’t miss these other posts touching on racism and antiracism: