White defensiveness

White defensiveness or white fragility is a term coined by Robin DiAngelo to refer to what she describes as defensive responses by many white people to discussions of societal discrimination, structural racism, and white privilege.

See also: White backlash
For the book, see White Fragility.

Definition

"White fragility" is a term coined by Robin DiAngelo in a 2011 paper in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, which states that white people react to "racial stress" with an "outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation." DiAngelo theorized that this reaction served to "reinstate white racial equilibrium."[1] The term has since been analyzed in academia and described in media as a distinct range of expressions by many white people in a number of historical settings, and up to modern times.[2] The term is often tied to the idea of structural racism.[3][4]

Peter Baker argues that "white fragility" can find expression in silence or shutting down, denial, accusations of reverse racism, as well as upset, anger or rage at an interpersonal level.[5][6] The latter individualistic form of response is not, however, to be confused with the terms "white backlash" or "white rage", which refer to exclusionary or violent group reactions by some whites to the societal progression of people of color.

History

European colonialism and slavery

Writer Genevieve Valentine has explored how white defensiveness has hampered meaningful introspection of the consequences of European colonialism. For example, rather than point to how the adoption of slavery and European horse culture by the indigenous Native American tribes was a desperate method of survival, it can be used as an equivocation, in a form of justification, as to other racial groups also being involved in the practices brought to North America by white settlers.[7]

Similarly, University of Oxford Fellow Max Harris has observed the phenomenon in the politics of New Zealand. Referring to this form of white defensiveness as "Diversion", some European New Zealanders deflect attention onto the pre-Pākehā settlers era before colonization, ascribing an unrelated guilt or culpability to Māori people.[8]

In 1800, a failed rebellion planned by slave Gabriel Prosser caused both a drop in support for anti-slavery societies, which had been petitioning against structural racism, and an increase in white defensiveness in the Upper South.[9] In the post-slavery United States, there has historically been frustration from African American communities at white defensiveness and its consequences causing a lack of accountability.[10]

Study of the phenomenon

Multiple studies have explored how white defensiveness, intersecting with whiteness, operates in areas of society, such as education.[11] Professor Cynthia Levine-Rasky's 2011 research showed how an unconscious white defensiveness is often present in traditional teaching candidates in the West.[12] White defensiveness has been academically examined within the context of post-election of Donald Trump.[13]

White fragility

Academic Robin DiAngelo has theorized that, as the mainstream perception of racism implies a conscious "meanness", that racism's definition is the cause of practically all white defensiveness.[14][15] DiAngelo, who coined the term white fragility in the early 2010s and later released her 2018 book White Fragility, describes this fragility as a range of defensive responses by white people.[16] However, not all scholars agree that Robin DiAngelo's assumptions about an implicit racism peculiar only to white people is devoid of its own ideology [17]

Types of expression

Reverse racism

A form of defensiveness can be an insistence on a relativistic view of history, where white people are also the victims of historical oppression and racism.[18] In the late 1990s, professor Paul Orlowski observed the emergence of white defensiveness in working-class communities of British Columbia, where investigating structural racism in the province led to accusations of being anti-white.[19]

Terminologist barriers

Some scholars and researchers have pointed to the increasingly understood use and application of critical theory terms, such as white privilege or fragility, creating the potential for terminologist-driven dialogue which fails to properly engage the social phenomena involved with structural racism. In 2019, as reported by professor Lauren Michele Jackson, writer Claudia Rankine abandoned attempts to document conversations with white men,[20] due to her perception that the use of accurate terminology was actually providing somewhat of a barrier to progress and further enabling white defensiveness.[21]

Criticism

Economist Jonathan Church has criticised the concept, arguing that it rests on the concept of implicit bias, which Church argues is a highly contested and dubious concept. Church also argues that DiAngelo infers systemic oppression from racial disparities but she does not actually prove the link and her works lacks substantial, proven and rigorous statistical analysis for her to make such a claim. Church argues that if white fragility is what sustains racism, DiAngelo's work should contain analyses to determine this, yet she fails to do so. Church also argues that DiAngelo's idea is effectively unfalsifiable because she dismisses criticisms of white fragility as evidence of white fragility, which Church argues renders it nothing more than pseudoscience.[22][23][24]

Jesse Lile, an educator and relationship therapist, has argued that the DiAngelo's concept of white fragility places white people in a double bind, first enjoining them to engage in a conversation on racism, then treating any active engagement on their part as an exercise of white privilege, and finally labelling them as fragile when they object to their ideas being dismissed on the basis of their skin color.[25]

Kelefa Sanneh, a journalist and music critic, argues that DiAngelo "reduces all of humanity to two categories: white and other", and that she presents people of color as "sages, speaking truths that white people must cherish, and not challenge". Sanneh also criticizes what he sees as DiAngelo's tendency to be "endlessly deferential—for her, racism is basically whatever any person of color thinks it is".[26]

Writing in New Discourses, religious and postmodernist studies researcher Helen Pluckrose[27] and Jonathan Church opined that the notion of implicit bias underlying white fragility theory is "pseudoscience" and the theory itself fails due to the reification and ambiguity fallacies. Describing the theory as a Kafka trap, they observe that "[a]ny response to being told by DiAngelo that one is complicit in racism, apart from agreeing with her, is evidence of white fragility."[28] The same point was raised by Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post, who writes: "any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point."[29]

References
  1. DiAngelo, Robin (2011). "White Fragility". International Journal of Critical Pedagogy. 3 (3): 54–70. Retrieved 14 June 2020.
  2. Emily Nussbaum (October 28, 2011). "The Rebirth of the Feminist Manifesto". New York. The sickening shot goes viral, inspiring a webwide debate that is classical in its dimensions, with echoes of schisms that go back to the days of the suffragettes: black revulsion, white defensiveness, and a spiraling conversation about institutional privilege.
  3. Zach Powers (February 10, 2016). "South Sound higher education leaders shake up what's comfortable to examine diversity, racism and privilege". Pacific Lutheran University. The afternoon centered on exploring the roots of white defensiveness and microaggressions, as well as ways to challenge racism in individual relationships, classrooms and institutions at large.
  4. Kim A. Case (2012). "Social Support, Privacy, and Isolation". Discovering the Privilege of Whiteness: White Women’s Reflections on Anti-racist Identity and Ally Behavior (Volume 68 ed.). Journal of Social Issues. p. 92. The sensitivity and defensiveness of Whites that often occurs when race enters the conversation (Fine, 1997; Jackson, 1999) may leave White anti-racists to privately cope with an issue that is overwhelming for any one individual. However, one characteristic essential to making a reading or discussion group successful is participants’ willingness to learn about race and racism as members of the dominant racial group.
  5. Peter C. Baker (June 19, 2018). "A Cure for White Fragility". Pacific Standard. Most Americans will find DiAngelo's catalog of these evasive moves familiar; wearingly so for people of color, embarrassingly so for whites. Even for readers relatively wise to the ways of white defensiveness, it is usefully bracing to see so many maneuvers standing in a line-up together.
  6. George Yancy (2014). "Teaching White Settler Subjects Antiracist Feminisms". Exploring Race in Predominantly White Classrooms. Routledge. p. 67. ISBN 978-0415836692. Ringrose suggests that one of the main challenges of critical antiracist pedagogy comes from White defensiveness in feminist antiracist spaces and classrooms. But, in this instance, the usual White defensiveness — including shutting down, silence, anger, tears, denial, disavowal - was momentarily suspended.
  7. Genevieve Valentine (April 17, 2016). "Horrors Pile Up Quietly In 'The Other Slavery'". NPR. It's unfortunate, though inevitable, that some of the facts under discussion have lost historical resonance amid the long-standing cloud of white defensiveness. The fact that some Native American nations sought to maintain autonomy by adapting European horse culture and becoming slavers themselves is an object lesson in the trickle-down horrors of colonialism
  8. Max Harris (June 10, 2018). "Racism and White Defensiveness in Aotearoa: A Pākehā Perspective". e-tangata.co.nz. The second type of white defensiveness is Diversion. This is where, in instances in which facts about racism or colonisation are raised, the conversation is derailed through a claim that Māori themselves are guilty of some other wrong.
  9. Michael Kazin; Rebecca Edwards; Adam Rothman, eds. (2011). The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. Princeton University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0691152073. As a direct result of increased white defensiveness, antislavery societies in the Upper South disbanded or declined. Meanwhile, in the North, a new scientific racism encouraged white residents to interpret social status in racial terms
  10. Brian Murphy (2018). "Project Say Something's Whose Monument Project". In David B. Allison (ed.). Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide for Community Leaders. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 255. ISBN 978-1538113738. Nothing is more important than listening during these public conversations. I heard the defensiveness of white people who did not want to be told that their ancestors may have been racist; I heard African Americans frustrated with the lack of historical accountability.
  11. Cynthia Ninivaggi (2008), Whites Teaching Whites About Race: Racial Identity Theory and White Defensiveness in the Classroom, Teaching Anthropology Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges Notes
  12. Cynthia Levine-Rasky (2011), The practice of whiteness among teacher candidates, International Studies in Sociology of Education, White defensiveness is common among teacher candidates (McIntyre, 1997a; Sleeter 1995a, 1995b; O'Donnell, 1998; Smith, 1998; Clooney & Akintunde, 1999). Emerging from a political agenda in which the language of marginalization is appropiated by socially dominant groups (Roman, 1993), this response is most evident among the traditional teacher candidates in this study.
  13. Ashley Van Riper (2019), “I'm Not Racist; I'm Nice”: White Defensiveness, Silencing, and Refusal To Listen in a Post-Election U.S, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: Journal of Student Scholarship
  14. Anna Kelsey-Sugg; Sasha Fegan (August 21, 2018). "Robin DiAngelo on why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism". ABC Online.
  15. Nadira Hira (August 22, 2019). "Why the Fight Against Racism has to Start With Owning It". Newsweek. The mainstream definition of 'racism' is when an individual consciously doesn't like people based on race and is intentionally mean to them," said academic, longtime diversity trainer and author of White Fragility Robin DiAngelo. "Who is going to own intentional meanness? That definition is the root of virtually all white defensiveness.
  16. Robin DiAngelo (April 10, 2015). "White America's racial illiteracy: Why our national conversation is poisoned from the start". Salon. Not often encountering these challenges, we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium. I term that push back white fragility.
  17. "The Problem with 'White Fragility' Theory". August 24, 2018. I first came across the notion of ‘white fragility’ when I began raising concerns that, in many cases, progressive activism is inspired by ideas that lack sufficient support from social science research. For example, elsewhere I have questioned whether confirmation bias affects the judgment of social justice activists. I have lamented how progressives such as Claudia Rankine have turned the Emmy-award-winning show Breaking Bad into a paradigm of ‘whiteness’ by misinterpreting the motives that drove Walter White to become a modern Macbeth
  18. Cameron McCarthy (2005). Race, Identity, and Representation in Education. Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 978-0415949934. The current celebration of ubiquitous or essential "racial differences" (permitted by the discourse of multiculturalism) is itself already in danger of becoming an expression of rearticulated white defensiveness. By white defensiveness, I mean the relativistic assertion that white, like "people of color," are history's oppressed subjects of racism.
  19. Paul Orlowski (2001). Carl E. James; Adrienne Shadd (eds.). Talking about Identity: Encounters in Race, Ethnicity, and Language. Between the Lines Books. p. 263. ISBN 978-1896357362. The findings from my research, corroborated by my subsequent classroom experiences, go far to explain the recent rise of "white defensiveness" within British Columbia's working class. That attitude can easily result in ugly behaviour ... a few days after a Vancouver daily printed a one-page article on the finds of my thesis, a student informed me that both he and his mother "were outraged" by my anti-white ideas
  20. Lauren Michele Jackson (September 4, 2019). "I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked". Slate. In a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine, Claudia Rankine cataloged her own aborted attempts to talk to white men about white male privilege.
  21. Claudia Rankine (July 17, 2019). "I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked". The New York Times. “They’re just defensive,” he said. “White fragility,” he added, with a laugh. This white man who has spent the past 25 years in the world alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. These phrases — white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation — have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation.
  22. Church, Jonathan (24 August 2018). "The Problem with 'White Fragility' Theory". Quillette. Retrieved 2020-06-15.
  23. Church, Jonathan (21 December 2018). "The Epistemological Problem of White Fragility Theory". areomagazine.com. Retrieved 2020-06-15.
  24. Church, Jonathan; Pluckrose, Helen (2020-06-08). "The Flaws in White Fragility Theory: A Primer". New Discourses. Retrieved 2020-06-15.
  25. Jesse Lile (2019-06-18). "'White Fragility' Is A Racist Idea That Should Be Retired Immediately". The Federalist. Retrieved 2019-07-09..
  26. Sanneh, Kelefa (August 12, 2019). "The Fight to Redefine Racism". The New Yorker. Retrieved June 15, 2020.
  27. "Helen Pluckrose – Battle of Ideas 2017". battleofideas.org.uk. Retrieved 2020-06-20.
  28. Church, Jonathan; Pluckrose, Helen (2020-06-08). "The Flaws in White Fragility Theory: A Primer". New Discourses. Retrieved 2020-06-13.
  29. Lozada, Carlos (June 18, 2020). "White fragility is real. But White Fragility is flawed". Washington Post.
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