White Fragility and the Question of Trust
“I need to trust that you won’t think I am racist before I can work on my racism.” That’s white fragility in action.
I am a racial justice educator. On a daily basis, I lead primarily white groups in discussions of race and racism.
A significant but challenging aspect of my work is giving white people feedback on our inevitable and often unaware racist patterns. This has led to my identification of what I term white fragility — the inability of white people to handle challenges to our racial worldviews, identities, or positions. Because we live in a society that protects and insulates us from these challenges, we have not had to build the stamina to withstand them. Mainstream culture, schools, media, institutions, and ideologies center us and reinforce a racially limited (and racist) worldview, engendering a deeply internalized sense of racial superiority and entitlement. At the same time, we are taught that to feel racially superior is bad and immoral. This dichotomy results in the need to aggressively deny our internalized superiority to ourselves and others. On the rare occasions in which this denial is confronted, it comes as a kind of a shock to the system; a challenge to our rightful place in the hierarchy and an…
