White Fragility Chapter 6

 

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Garrett McLeod                                                         

Professor Heather Stewart-Steele

ENGL-1301

3/14/2021

                                                            Chapter 6 Blog Response

            DiAngelo’s primary focus in this chapter is to address the fact that while there are certainly all kinds of discrimination against all kinds of groups, not just Black people, in this country in particular Black people have been used by Whites use as the main way to distinguish themselves as a creature that is higher in the natural hierarchy. It is not Whiteness, but the lack of Blackness that defines them, because when Black people were not a factor in most White societies before colonization, the distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ cultures was based entirely on your class position. But the bringing in of Black people made it so that the distinction between these cultures became focused on the racial differences. Lower-class Whites still have it hard to this day for sure, but have been infinitely better off since the entrance of Black people into our society, because all of the exploitation and hatred of ‘lower’ culture could be off-loaded onto Black people, and so they have borne the brunt of the cruelties imposed by Upper-class Whites.

            The main reason though that Black people were forced into our society in the first place was the desire for the insane profits of slavery. And so, the myth of racial superiority developed at first because of the need for any possible reason to treat imprisoned Black laborers like more

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than just prisoners of war, but full-fledged slaves. Later on, of course this seed of racial superiority flowered into the intricate and incredibly wealthy Plantation network of the pre-Civil War South, then evolved further into the Jim Crow era, and now has made hopefully its final transformation before it dies away in our society, in the form of the post-civil rights adaptation of racial discrimination which we have extensively discussed.

            One of the first things that must be done when addressing how Whiteness has been defined by Blackness in our history and contemporary culture, is to address one’s own group identity. This can be incredibly hard for many White people who squeal at the proposition of identifying with any group rather than with their precious individual selves. I am very aware of this mindset, and it was the central message of my own family’s communication to me on racial issues. They insist that we are to act and be judged only as individuals, and therefore to examine oneself in a group context is dangerous to that sense of individualism. Without acknowledging that individuals have an infinite number of blind spots, and so they could be reinforcing group hierarchies without knowing it, and in fact that is the primary way that it happens. Much more important than that though, the main reason that at least in contemporary America we cannot simply shed our group identities, is because doing so is a privilege in and of itself. It is the height of privilege for my White family to ignore race, because Black people simply do not and never have in this country been able to ignore race. What would ignoring their race have meant for a Black person under slavery? It did not matter how they thought of themselves, they were apart of the Black group identity, and that one fact shaped the course of their lives more than any individual decision could have.