#white fragility

My sleep schedule has been all over the place lately – hoping to correct that this weekend.

The Distress of the Privileged by Doug Muder
As the culture evolves, people who benefitted from the old ways invariably see themselves as victims of change. The world used to fit them like a glove, but it no longer does. Increasingly, they find themselves in unfamiliar situations that feel unfair or even unsafe. Their concerns used to take center stage, but now they must compete with the formerly invisible concerns of others.

Once you grasp the concept of privileged distress, you’ll see it everywhere: the rich feel “punished” by taxes; whites believe they are the real victims of racism; employers’ religious freedom is threatened when they can’t deny contraception to their employees; English-speakers resent bilingualism — it goes on and on.

And what is the Tea Party movement other than a counter-revolution? It comes cloaked in religion and fiscal responsibility, but scratch the surface and you’ll find privileged distress: Change has taken something from us and we want it back.

Confronting this distress is tricky, because neither acceptance nor rejection is quite right. The distress is usually very real, so rejecting it outright just marks you as closed-minded and unsympathetic. It never works to ask others for empathy without offering it back to them.

At the same time, my straight-white-male sunburn can’t be allowed to compete on equal terms with your heart attack. To me, it may seem fair to flip a coin for the first available ambulance, but it really isn’t. Don’t try to tell me my burn doesn’t hurt, but don’t consent to the coin-flip.

The Owldolatrous approach — acknowledging the distress while continuing to point out the difference in scale — is as good as I’ve seen. Ultimately, the privileged need to be won over. Their sense of justice needs to be engaged rather than beaten down. The ones who still want to be good people need to be offered hope that such an outcome is possible in this new world.

I appreciate the emphasis on empathy and compassion in Doug’s post. It reminds me of this amazing animated video, Sometimes You’re A Caterpillar, by Chescaleigh and Kat Blaque.

Sometimes you’re a caterpillar, and sometimes you’re a snail. It’s important to step back when you’re feeling attacked and ask if you’re the one with the privilege in the situation.

Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism by Dr. Robin DiAngelo
Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to individual racial prejudice and the intentional actions that result. The people that commit these intentional acts are deemed bad, and those that don’t are good. If we are against racism and unaware of committing racist acts, we can’t be racist; racism and being a good person have become mutually exclusive.

This systemic and institutional control allows those of us who are white in North America to live in a social environment that protects and insulates us from race-based stress. We have organized society to reproduce and reinforce our racial interests and perspectives. Further, we are centered in all matters deemed normal, universal, benign, neutral and good. Thus, we move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable.

These privileges and the white fragility that results prevent us from listening to or comprehending the perspectives of people of color and bridging cross-racial divides. The antidote to white fragility is on-going and life-long, and includes sustained engagement, humility, and education. We can begin by:

• Being willing to tolerate the discomfort associated with an honest appraisal and discussion of our internalized superiority and racial privilege.
  
• Challenging our own racial reality by acknowledging ourselves as racial beings with a particular and limited perspective on race.
  
• Attempting to understand the racial realities of people of color through authentic interaction rather than through the media or unequal relationships.
  
• Taking action to address our own racism, the racism of other whites, and the racism embedded in our institutions – e.g., get educated and act.
  

I really like all of the examples that Robin gives – of the kinds of challenges that trigger racial stress, and the patterns that make it difficult for white people to understand racism as a system. At work, there’s a document of common derailing anti-patterns that’s similar (some parts of Google culture are really, really great). Just like it can help to identify conflict patterns, it’s important to be able to identify patterns in structural inequality and the way we think about privilege.

The War on Women Is Over – And Women Lost by Molly Redden
While you weren’t watching, conservatives fundamentally rewrote abortion laws.

This is what 2015 looks like: Abortion providers struggle against overwhelming odds to stay open, while women “turn themselves into pretzels” to get to them, as one researcher put it. Activists have been calling it the “war on women.” But the onslaught of new abortion restrictions has been so successful, so strategically designed, and so well coordinated that the war in many places has essentially been lost.

Most abortions today involve some combination of endless wait, interminable journey, military-level coordination, and lots of money. Roe v. Wade was supposed to put an end to women crossing state lines for their abortions. But while reporting this story, I learned of women who drove from Kentucky to New Jersey, or flew from Texas to Washington, DC, because it was the only way they could have the procedure. Even where laws can’t quite make it impossible for abortion clinics to stay open—they are closing down at a rate of 1.5 every single week—they can make it exhausting to operate one. In every corner of America, four years of unrelenting assaults on reproductive rights have transformed all facets of giving an abortion or getting one—possibly for good.

Where providers like Miller and Chelian see an extreme public health crisis, abortion foes see progress. Charmaine Yoest, the president of Americans United for Life, says that “apocalyptic” stories about abortion restrictions are not “an accurate representation.” AUL, which has written most of the model abortion legislation adopted across the country, is responsible for the recent wave of restrictions. Yoest claims that Roe v. Wade implicitly permits abortion for any reason at any time during pregnancy; the legislative changes AUL champions are moderating forces on an otherwise radical and dangerous law.

Because AUL’s measures seem reasonable, not only can legislators from red districts use them to rally the base, but those from purple districts can get behind them without facing a backlash. But the effects of these seemingly moderate and sensible abortion restrictions have, in fact, been breathtakingly radical.

This really, really sucks. What scares me is that the people creating these laws and barriers believe that they’re doing the right thing. What terrifies me is that I used to think the same thing in high school. Embarrassingly, I was staunchly pro-life because it was wrong to kill people (and fetuses are obviously people), and obviously if someone got pregnant, they could just put the child up for adoption. I viewed it as such a black and white decision that even my (conservative but pro-choice) mother was surprised.

I spend a few minutes every day wallowing in remorse when I remember the things I used to believe.

In 2007, the movie Juno came out. I don’t remember exactly what I thought at the time, but I liked it because it was witty, funny, and Juno had a burger phone. Now, I don’t like the movie. I look back on the scenes where she encounters a protestor outside the abortion clinic, has a terrible experience inside, and decides not to go through with it because the protestor told her that her baby has fingernails as harmful. As a teenager indoctrinated by the church, those were the scenes I expected. The lone, admirable pro-life protestor. The unsympathetic, indifferent clinic. The idea that someone can be persuaded to undergo permanent body changes and risk their health for months by something as trite as “a fetus has fingernails”. I’m angry that such a popular movie perpetuated those stereotypes, and I’m angry at myself for not questioning what I was told sooner. I also wish that more people around me had talked about their views; that’s one of the main reasons why I’m working on speaking up about my beliefs now.

I’ve been doing a lot reading this summer and I thought it would be interesting to post the things I find thought-provoking.

Against Charity by Mathew Snow
Rather than creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

The core problem is the bourgeois moral philosophy that the movement rests upon. Effective Altruists abstract from — and thereby exonerate — the social dynamics constitutive of capitalism. The result is a simultaneously flawed moral and structural analysis that aspires to fix the world’s most pressing problems on capital’s terms.

Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

Having been reading more and more socialist/radical left commentary, I feel like most criticism can be distilled down into, “the system is wrong, so why are we focusing on making this thing inside the system better?” This is particularly evident in the criticism of animal welfare by animal rights advocates, i.e. why are you pushing for better treatment of animals before they’re killed when they shouldn’t be killed in the first place?

Lessons in White Fragility: When Vegan Abolitionists Appropriate Intersectionality by Dr. C. Michele Martindill
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.

They spout clichés such as “all lives matter” or “just go vegan” or “veganism is not about race” or “intersectionality shows the interconnectedness of all oppressions.” When anyone in the animal rights movement claims they are practicing intersectional veganism, defining it merely as wanting justice for all and being against all exploitation and oppression, they are operating under a misguided act of cultural appropriation. They are also working to insure that an upper class white cis gendered ableist man dominated ideology remains at the center of the vegan abolitionist animal rights movement. Intersectionality or pro-intersectionality is not a let’s-have-a-group-hug approach to social justice, nor is it simply a path to growing a revolution—increasing movement membership–that will end all oppressive social systems.

Intersectionality has become a buzzword these days, without acknowledging Patricia Hill Collins or Kimberle Crenshaw or that the term was originally used to describe how Black women experience multiple systems of oppression. This was important for me to read because before I knew the history, I had thought that intersectionality was simply the acknowledgment that multiple systems of oppression can affect a group of people and how oppressions are interconnected.

This Is What I Mean When I Say “White Feminism” by Cate Young
I’m talking about the feminism that disregards the fact that whiteness is a privilege that is not afforded to all women. 

Every single time women of colour talk about “white feminism” or “white feminists” within the context of discussions about the way that the mainstream feminist movement privileges whiteness, we deal with an onslaught of defensive white women insisting that they personally are not like that, and would you please say “some white women” and not make generalizations?

Now, I understand the impulse to get defensive. It can be very off-putting to feel attacked for a transgression that you know yourself not to be guilty of. But in the context of social justice and movement building, if you’re feeling attacked, it probably means you’re having your privilege challenged, not that you are a bad person. As I always say, “If it doesn’t apply to you, then it’s not about you. If it’s not about you, then don’t take it personally.” Being a good ally means recognizing that sometimes your input is not needed or wanted, and that it’s incredibly inappropriate to demand that a marginalized group, (in this case, WoC within the feminist movement) restructure a conversation that is happening to serve their needs, in a way that is more “comfortable” for the very people they are mobilizing against. That is the very definition of flexing one’s privilege.

I think a lot of this can also be applied to privilege in general, i.e. when you call out someone’s privilege, they get defensive and insist that they personally don’t want or act on their privilege. It reminds me of a sermon that John Metta gave last month – I, Racist. He spoke about how he doesn’t talk about race with white people because they’re unable to divorce their participation in a racist system from an accusation that they themselves are racist. “Without being able to make that differentiation, White people in general decide to vigorously defend their own personal non-racism, or point out that it doesn’t exist because they don’t see it.”

Intent over Impact. Responsibility over abdication. Growth over fragility.

[alt text on images]

afronerdism:

thebreakfastgenie:

afronerdism:

afronerdism:

It’s pride month soon so the posts are rolling in and it is just absolutely incredible how white gays have managed to center themselves in every conversation about the AIDS epidemic.

I do not want to see literally any commentary about the AIDS epidemic that does not specifically denote how the majority of people who died and a huge reason it was allowed to rampage was because it was killing black people specifically. And to this day, more black people die of aids than all of the other demographics combined.

We only make up 13% of the US population and yet we still make up the majority of deaths and we haven’t even begun to talk about how hiv/aids has been left un and under treated in African countries due to nothing but colonialism and white supremicist greed.

So no. I don’t want to talk about the aids epidemic unless black peoples are included in that narrative.

So anyway, as a black bisexual woman gay white men can shut the fuck up.

This post is absolutely vile. I’m not going to call it anything else. I’d be happy to reblog a post about the impact of AIDS on the black community that didn’t minimize the impact on the gay community.

And don’t start with the “white gays” thing. Don’t. It was all gay men. The Reagan administration let them die because they were gay. There were people like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan saying they deserved to die for being gay. A relatively popular belief was that AIDS was god’s punishment for homosexuality. This applied to all gay men. White gay men were not protected from AIDS or from homophobia. Entire communities were dying.

AIDS used to be called “the gay cancer” or GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency).

HIV continues to be a health crisis in many African countries and there are a lot of important conversations to be had about that, but this post is just being homophobic.

I don’t know how to explain to you that as a black queer woman I am specifically talking about the ways in which black queer people have been erased from this conversation. Y’all are not about to all lives matter this post. Please

cobalt-rat:

white woman special move

quietstorm-thundathighs:

“I’m unmoved by white tears.”

How like woke whities to keep reblogging from racists in the name of “history” as if white people’s history isn’t the only version of history they know.

White people’s comfort is not the purpose of racism discussions.