On “White Fragility”
taibbi.substack.com
taibbi.substack.com
Yet, during the Floyd protests, our equity committee sent out an email with a recommended reading list including white fragility and other similar books.
Only books that had a similar premise were included, no smart, critical books (including some I can think of written by POC) with any other conclusions or arguments were included.
Everything in the company, from the big picture down to the smallest details, received critical scrutiny and thoughtful didcussion- from architecture to code style to customer experience to market position.
And yet, any topic that can end with -ism (racism, genderism, etc) can not ever be scrutinized. Words like "blacklist" are abolished, in spite of both prior art and POC employees being (privately) offended that they are thought of as being so fragile. The atmosphere is so thick on such topics that no-one speaks up for fear of being fired.
I've seen posts elsewhere that claim the etymology of blacklist, specifically, isn't based on this metaphor, but this metaphor exists throughout English. Consider this line from A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Not Hermia but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove?" where light > dark is so obvious that all you have to do is compare one girl to a dark bird and one to a light bird to make your point.
Again, it's possible to go to far with this (e.g. whitespace), but that's a question of where to draw the line, not if.
If we're going to make a change to language then it should be to stop describing people as black or white. Which was never particularly accurate to begin with, since "black people" are really varying shades of brown and "white people" are varying shades of pink to light brown anyway.
I assume it's too much to ask that we stop categorizing people by "race" entirely.
There is an entire TVTropes page dedicated to "Dark Is Not Evil" and it's not a purely subversive trope either, quite popular in media as well.
There is also plenty of media (and culture) where darkness is sacred and pure, not evil or cold. Consider the dwarves in the discworld series that hold this belief. For more real-life examples, the hebrew bible generally refers to shadows and darkness as good since when you live in a desert, those things will bring you some fresh air and protection from the sun.
Superman: Literally powered by the light of the sun, boy scout who never breaks the rules, hard-working member of the proletariat.
Batman: Tortured soul with tragic backstory, lawless vigilante, billionaire (regarded as evil in popular media, cf. Lex Luthor).
The darkness in Batman is the adversity the hero has to overcome. It's integral to the story but it isn't pleasant. You can't imagine the young Bruce Wayne wishing for somebody to murder his parents so he can grow up to don a bat suit and punch criminals in dark of night.
And so it is with the other common depictions of darkness in hero types -- an internal struggle, not a desired characteristic in itself.
You can find the odd situation where darkness actually is positively desirable in itself, but not enough to overshadow all of the more common ones where it isn't.
I don't agree with your assessment of Batman and I would point out that Batman isn't regarded as evil in popular media (and even if he was, Superman was evil plenty of times, see Superman Red Son)
Lastly, I would mention that in hero types, a internal struggle is usually desired to counterbalance or embolden external conflict. Even superman has internal conflicts.
For example, I have black eyes and hair, but I never once felt I was less a person because of this abstract generalization. I don't recall ever having made such a connection until when I started thinking about arguing against the reasoning behind banning blacklist.
Similarly, obsidian and black granite are typically considered beautiful. When I choose the color of my phone or display or car, I don't think white = good or black = bad. When there is context, this abstract association does not come to mind; rather, for example, I think that white can distract from the screen of a phone, or that it wears its stains easily. Or when I choose a dark theme for my editor and apps for ease of viewing in low light. Or with clothes; I don't think (black = bad) when I wear my black clothing.
So this is why I disagree with this; we associate ourselves with black things and make color judgments all the time, but rarely does the value judgment of white = good, black = bad figure in these judgments (modulo actual reasons in particular contexts, e.g. stains easily, vs. hard to see in low light). An argument that this "psycholinguistic effect" actually happens also needs to address the many other categories in which we make color judgments in our lives. (Question: does a strongly racist person significantly and subconsciously disassociate themselves with black products more than the average person? Beyond conscious decision on color to symbolize their attitude, and the subconscious generalization from this symbolic desire.)
With respect to blacklist, it seems to me that this is the most unfortunate product about the whole discussion. I believe that hardly anyone has associated the word "blacklist" with derogatory attitudes against blacks, but now someone has made "blacklist" and black of race so tightly bound semantically that we can't help but think of race when we now see the word blacklist --- even when nothing close is ever being intended by the people who use the word.
I think that my model that there are many semantic categories of blackness for which the value judgment (white = good, black = bad) doesn't figure at all as a "psycholinguistic effect" is more accurate. If this is indeed the case, then ironically the whole discussion over "blacklist" has caused more harm than good, since it is enlarging the collection of meanings that remind people of derogatory attitudes against blacks.
The idea that false cognates should be banned because they might contribute to bad thinking ignores, or at least downplays to a foolish extent, the individual relationships and interactions people have.
We might as well ban the word "gift" as well at any kind of celebration, for fear of making German speakers think that it is okay to poison people.
I would just caution too that no one speaks on behalf of their whole race, and what people say to you in such a climate is not necessarily what they feel in their heart. It’s interesting that someone would be principally concerned with feeling like they were perceived as fragile.
You honestly can't say "Can we talk about appropriateness of the word blacklist? It doesn't seem as harmful as other terms."
What company do you work for?
My company luckily has less of this going on but it's slowly growing.
That said, we do have higher ups who have no problem talking politics while waiting for people to join video calls, and naturally they all agree with each other. Noone with half a brain would speak up unless they were also agreeing- higher ups are our bosses, not our friends, after all.
They redefined scrutiny as attacking.
They redefined gender (a word used people it wasn’t proper to say sex) to “what sex you feel you are”.
They are trying to redefine racism so only white people can have it.
They are redefining majority as “not by numbers”.
They are redefining past suffering as “only that which happened to blacks or glbt”.
I know people who come from places with 25% casualty rates during WWII (actual recent immigrants) and are told they need to check their privilege and they don’t know what suffering is.
They have redefined slavery as the only crime that matters and slavery if blacks as the only one that counts.
Not buying in is now a phobia.
When people redefine words like this it is the clearest sign of a campaign of gatekeeping and attempt to expunge history and culture.
To be fair, the other side did it too. When Texas school textbooks redefine slaves as “migrant workers” you can’t tell me that’s not an attempt to expunge history.
Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder why people keep using social media at all.
It’s terrible that this guy’s daughter made racist posts 8 years ago, but we have no idea what kind of person she is today. She could be doing community organizing against police brutality and it wouldn’t matter at all.
The posterity of childhood is one of the most dystopian aspects of our technology-driven society. It’s like a 2020 version of the Scarlet Letter.
>Beginning as a small shop in 1986, Holy Land has expanded into a sprawling business that includes an eatery, grocery store, catering business, and commercial food business, with a large restaurant and production facility in Northeast Minneapolis and a stand at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport. Its hummus, sauces, and flatbreads are carried by several area grocery stores.
There's a place like that in this town, it has 4 or 5 people working there and two of them are the owner's sons -- they have a restaurant, and in the back they put spices and vegetables into bags and sell them to two local markets, and also in the hallway of the restaurant, which doubles as their "grocery store". They cater, too. This is a town of ~30k.
Small businesses have a habit of aggrandizing themselves. The royal we and such.
I also wonder this. I know this is a common theme on this board, but I haven’t posted anything under my own name since 2015, when I left Facebook during the run up to the 2016 election.
I am careful with my words when I post. I try to avoid sarcasm, try to mean what I say and say what I mean. But I am not confident that a poorly worded question or statement won’t resurface in a few years and make me look like an asshole.
So I choose not to post under my real name, and even then I don’t dip into anything controversial. I don’t post pictures of myself on the Internet at all. I advise everyone to do the same.
This is not terrible.
It's what intelligent, confident and good children do, they push at social normal to learn about society and to try to actually think independently, they actually learn not to be racist, not just rote learn it like so many people.
What society needs to do, is find a way for them to do this while not hurting others around them like classmates which these Tweets might have done. Quite frankly screw the adults on Twitter, they are not nice people.
If you do, then I shall waste no time shaking the dust off my feet when I leave, because two things are true as a result. First, you think it’s OK to ban books and are thus beyond the pale to start with; Second, either you understand the denouement of that book and don’t like it because you’re a racist, or you’ve probably internalized White Fragility a bit too thoroughly and dismiss Huck out of hand because it dares to have the n-word in it and have never read the denouement or realized what it means.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t.
And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
Yaron's issue is that it denies individual responsibility for their wrong-headed thinking utterly; denies free will and the ability for individuals to change their minds and be decent; and finally, that by characterizing people as inherently this or that on the basis of race is itself a deeply racist approach to the topic.
Is this an accurate summary or is it mistaken?
> The book raises striking and specific points about how as whites we have biases toward race while pretending we are colorblind. She states specific examples, and outlays practical way forward.
> Most of the lower star ratings of this book seem to be exhibiting the exact fragility she outlines, and really only prove to drive her point home further.
- Goodreads
From a very quick look at the preview on Google Books, I'd say it's deeply inaccurate when it comes to the central message of the book.
> He describes its worldview as one where all white people are inescapably racist by due being born white in this place and time, and that there is nothing we can do about it because it is part of our psyche.
The point the book seems to lay out for itself is that awareness of the nature of racial privilege and the related sensitivity is key to enabling one to doing something about it, the exact opposite of it being inescapable. From the introduction: “If, however, I understand racism as a system into which I was socialized, I can receive feedback on my problematic racial patterns as a helpful way to support my learning and growth.”
With stuff like this it can be helpful to change the hot button hand grenade word to something less emotional. So change racism to "dysfunctional family behavior" or "alcoholism" and imagine the statement is discussing recovery. Does it sound reasonable now?
I haven't read this book so I can't comment about it overall. I would say that for hot button issues like this I am inclined to reserve judgment until I read the actual book.
And even if it is still a matter for the individual, the book asserts that racism is an inherently white trait. Again, that's racist.
The book promotes far more racist ideas than it combats. Its popularity shows just how happy people are for the pendulum to swing the other way.
Assuming you have read the book and reached that conclusion based on the actual content, I'd be interested in specific support for that claim. Because while I haven't read much (again, just some of the freely-available preview on Google Books), that description conflicts with essentially every bit I have read, including the sentence I quoted from the introduction, which from reading the introduction seems to be the author’s direct statement of their motivation with the book.
> And even if it is still a matter for the individual, the book asserts that racism is an inherently white trait.
It seems to say it is a system into which Whites in the modern USA tend to be socialized into participating in in varying ways and degrees; it seems to be extremely repetitive on the point that it is a product of social context and not an inherent trait. I supposed it is possible that after the introduction the author pulls a 180° and reverses every word of the Introduction, but it seems a lot more likely that the people painting the books content as being a bunch of things that the Right has been setting up as strawmen to argue against for decades before the book was published in discussions of race are just setting up those same strawmen again instead of engaging with the content of the book.
Outside the context of this discussion, I don’t think a reader could decide whether quotes like this are from a left wing anti-racism book, or a neo-Nazi pseudo intellectual
More troublesome quotes below
Why only whites can be racist:
> When I say that only whites can be racist, I mean that in the United States, only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color. People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people.
Attributing all cultural traits to race, and then labeling everybody based on their race
> Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm.
The whole thing is self-defeating, and it is a tragic indictment on the state of intellectualism and academia, that a book like this can be so widely praised.
I have personal thoughts and feelings on the matter for several reasons but I won't get into them here in order to try to remain neutral in merely stating the fact that said contention exists.
For those curious, I encourage research and if it's not too much trouble or against impartiality on my part I can try to point the way to some sources.
>White Fragility is a state in which even a minimal challenge to the white position becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including: argumentation, invalidation, silence, withdrawal and claims of being attacked and misunderstood.
You could replace the world white by any other word. And you can replace the list of defensive moves by the equivalent statement : "refusal to unconditionally comply", since it's the only option left.
I would venture a guess that this covers about 75% of human interactions, and 99% of interactions when the discussion is about challenging someone's interests or position.
However, I hardly ever hear about other dominant elites being challenged this way (with the occasional exception when Palestine is brought up), so your hypothetical phrasing is largely accurate, as far as I'm aware.
The primary argument seems to be that we should stop discussing the lived experiences of black people and the issues they keep trying to bring up because talking about things is the real issue.
It also strips away any agency from black people by suggesting any coverage of these issues is because of the media and white liberals instead of what black people want.
Like, if color-blindness is not even a goal anymore, how would a post-racist world look? What would be the role of whites in this world?
If "whites" don't exist anymore (not because anyone was killed but because "whiteness" is a particular socialisation and a system of privilege which will have been abandoned), what is the role of descendants of European settlers?
(I haven't read the book yet, so it may be I've fallen for right-wing strawmen in those discussions.)
I think the claim is that a post-racist world is a racist construct because white racism is indelible, and the role of whites is to subordinate themselves to the oppressed and support their goals, indefinitely, as reparation.
It's useful to keep in mind what's actually happening to people like Taibbi, Greenwald etc. For years, they've been trying to lead the class-war faction of the left - for them race was irrelevant and distracted from the actual problems, for which they had a ready made solution. These solutions, M4A, etc, didn't have to deal with race. But, this faction lost. There's not conspiracy, people just didn't want what Bernie, Taibbi, et all were selling, that's all.
The faction that did win does in fact talk about race and now Taibbi is out in the cold. But it's alright, this isn't the French Resolution, no one is coming for his head. He's just gonna have to take a back seat and wield less power. He'll be fine.
If the dynamic you're describing is correct (not saying it is) then this conclusion is wrong. When insecure people gain power they try to disenfranchise their enemies. But they have no real power over the far-enemies. Some conservative in a conservative stronghold with conservative employees and customers can't get canceled because nobody who could cancel them is inclined to do it.
The people who get their heads chopped off (or get fired or harassed etc.) are the near-enemies, who are the easiest to sacrifice when the new regime wants to prove it can put heads on spikes, because they're at the same time close enough to be vulnerable but far enough to be targets.
But, this faction lost. There's not conspiracy, people just didn't want what Bernie, Taibbi, et all were selling, that's all.
There was and is a conspiracy in plain sight, that is the control of media to present only two options: capitalist racists versus neoliberal thugs.
All polling suggests (and has done for a long time) that the US public is far to the left of either the Dems or Republicans on a bunch of issues to do with foreign relations and domestic policy.
This is not reflected in the media.
Unclear what you mean exactly. The way I interpret it, please correct me if I'm wrong, is:
The concept of "White Fragility" is so ridiculous and overbearing that it causes white people to retreat to a more conservative stance.
But I guess you could also mean it as:
White people are so fragile in their identities that being forced to be challenged about their beliefs and behaviors causes them to become defensive and retreat to a move conservative position.
Either way it's sort of a "heads I win tails you lose" situation she paints, which mostly makes me not interested in playing along.
Yup, that's basically it. It sounds especially insane to people from countries without colonial past or history of black slavery. You're stating big universal statements basing them on a specific characteristic of a few countries and if anybody disagree it proves your point :) How convenient.
If a minority fights against violence - e.g. police brutality - they are stunning and brave. If white people fight against violence - e.g. rioting and looting - they are fragile
Can we not accept that both of these things are worthy things to fight against, or do I have to roll my eyes so hard that I sever my optic nerve at the constant oneupmanship of "who is the most operssed?"
I am pretty certain that the majority of people in the country can agree on that. The trouble is, it's hard to ignore the kid throwing the tantrum in the middle of the room.
I think this is underselling it.
The problem is that it causes "white people" to think of themselves as "white people" instead of e.g. Americans, or just People. It creates a frame where their team is "white people" and they should get together with their teammates to fight for their interests. (And, of course, the same thing for "black people" as well.)
That isn't so much "a more conservative stance" as it is a more racist stance. Describing it as anti-racist is some kind of Orwellian doublethink.
Sort of like anti-fascism....
Per Wikitionary [1]: Any system of strong autocracy or oligarchy usually to the extent of bending and breaking the law, race-baiting, and/or violence against largely unarmed populations.
The " to the extent of bending and breaking the law, race-baiting, and/or violence against largely unarmed populations." perfectly describes Antifa's behavior during the recent protests turned riots.
If you stipulate that one group of people are voting to perpetuate oppression and another are voting to end it then you know who the good guys and bad guys are, but that's not how the people voting the way you don't want them to would characterize the situation.
So stunning, so brave.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This phrase is a meme that holds no value, and originates from an expression of spite and hatred. You should consider skipping things like that on HN, to keep your posts visible.