White Fragility, Chapter 2

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    McLeod 1

 

Garrett McLeod

Professor Heather Stewart-Steele

ENGL-1303

14 February 2021

                                                                                                                                       White Fragility: Chapter 2 Blog

DiAngelo includes the following quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates, “But race is the child of racism, not the father”. Meaning that it was not perceived differences in the aptitude of the soul, which initially caused for racial distinctions to begin to become codified both in formal law and cultural norms. It was the fact that Europeans had a direct economic interest in subjugating whole populations for their labor, and the distinctions between them in physical appearance provided a perfectly convenient excuse for why it was justified, even in the wake of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on freedom and equality.

            Overtime, the justifications became more and more ingrained into colonial societies with the help of academic backing, such as the development of Phrenology, which involves the studying of skull shapes in order to determine mental traits such as subservience and creativity, and later on the more subtle, but just as vicious publication of the Bell Curve, by Charles Murray, a book that came out as late as the 1990’s, which claimed that intelligence is genetically linked to race. Eventually, as it became the norm to perceive African Americans as being pre-destines for a life of either hard labor, or crime, as those were the only two things that a subjugated population can even do.

            She included the following argument from Kendi briefly, “if we truly believe that all humans are equal, then disparity in condition can only be the result of systemic discrimination”. This quote is an incredibly articulate expression of the sentiment that drives my views on race, but I never could have put it so well. If there are considerable measurable differences in outcomes between races on the scale of whole communities, unless you think that geography-based shifts in genetics could actually result in the outright supremacy of any of the groups, then it must be systemic, societal, legal, political, and economic discrimination that is making the difference.

            In the 1800’s is when most of my family came to America, and soon after that they began marrying other Whites who were no longer perceived as different ethnic identities, because they were beginning to become assimilated into the White race. I think my family is a good example of this, because they are Scottish, French, German, and Italian, which are probably the primary groups to be very easily assimilated into what was considered White, especially once the presence of Blackness became what defined Whiteness. For instance, DiAngelo mentions the efforts of an Armenian man to be reclassified as White, but he had to go through a legal process, and had to even use a scientific witness to affirm that he was scientifically Caucasian, a darkly humorous series of events, I think. Whereas it was relatively easy for most of my ancestors to be reclassified as White.

            The part that hit home for me the most in this chapter was pointing out the fact that the White Upper Class uses racial divisions to stoke animosity between people who on a material level, in terms of their wealth and necessity to sell their labor to earn a livelihood, have more in common with each other than with the Upper Class.