Voices

When I was in grad school, I arrived at an evening class to find my ordinarily approachable instructors in a different frame of mind. They sat, side by side, at the top of a circle of chairs that comprised the classroom. As the other students assembled and class began, they looked around at us with a palpable distain. One of them said to us, “Look to your left.” We did. The other said, “Look to your right.” We did. “Do you notice anything?”

We did. Even in Berkeley, CA, in 2006, the class was all white. This led to a conversation about race representation in the academy and a call to moral activism. What were we going to do to solve this problem?

That was fourteen years ago. I’m sorry to say I haven’t done much. I went with my nephews to a BLM March in 2017 partly because I could not erase the image of Philando Castille from my mind. I’m good about completing my reading lists so I always read a few new black voices a year. I have on occasion taught units on civil rights history.

But I have not done enough.

I don’t know what my Berkeley instructors would say to me now, but I thought of them while reading White Fragility. The author has the same drill sergeant approach that I experienced that night. She takes it a step further. She’s got a definite opinion on my inaction. All of this white apathy is not a coincidence. I am benefitting from structural racism.

I will admit to having a defensive response when I read this book. I am low income, I thought. No one cares what I have to say. It’s my boss’s fault, not mine. These are the “real” reasons I have not been able to do more.

But the author would not absolve me, nor any of us who think like this. She has made it her life’s work to snap white people out of their denial. In her job, she goes into corporate settings and challenges them on their policies. What she has found, time and again, is a standard white defensiveness to the facts she presents. When confronted with indispensable evidence, they talk about a lack of suitable candidates, or the lack of diversity in their community. In the worst instances, people break down in tears, as if their pain in the confrontation is a greater issue than the topic.

And all of this, she thinks, creates an uncomfortable burden on people of color. They have to seem forgiving or accommodating to sensitive white people. And it also obscures what the real issue is, which is that we have never effectively dismantled slavery.