White Fragility, Chapter 9

 

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Garrett McLeod

Professor Heather Stewart-Steele

ENGL-1303

April, 11 2021

Chapter 9 Blog Response

            The central focus of this chapter is to discuss how DiAngelo has continuously gotten better responses as a facilitator of racial workshops through learning to if not appease, then find a way to keep involved those who want to tune it out or just walk away because they feel they have been insulted. She also lists the feelings, behaviors, claims, assumptions, and functions of white fragility that she has come to be familiar with, in order to improve her ability to predict and defuse these tendencies among white audiences that can disrupt the functioning of the workshop for everyone else.

At no point does DiAngelo give ground on the primary purpose of her being there, which is to try to help people come into racial awareness, or at least start the process. However, she does seem to be put into a position by particular audience members where there is no other option but to allow for the attention of the workshop to be diverted to their personal grievances, whether they are about that specific racial workshop or just general shifts in attitudes toward racism. The most revealing example being the situation with Sharon and Jason, where DiAngelo told her that it may be the case that she did something which invalidated Jason’s experience as a black man. While tone is hard to accurately pin down when it is presented in text, there is no

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trace that I can pick up of any sort of malice in how DiAngelo said what she did to Sharon, much less directly accuse Sharon of being a vicious racist. Despite this, valuable time and emotional real estate was expended on appeasing Sharon by the rest of the group, while the possibility of Jason’s invalidation had been put to the side for the time being. In a somewhat similar situation where DiAngelo had a confrontation with a German woman named Eva, Eva made a variety of claims about her particular past and experiences that she claimed exempts her from any possibility of internalized racist attitudes. DiAngelo responded with measured arguments such as the high likelihood of Eva’s consumption of American media in which racist stereotypes have been propagated, no insults and no malice once again. Yet just a few months later, Eva told one of DiAngelo’s co-facilitators that Eva would not be going to another workshop led by her, which goes to show how much many feel like they must be pandered to or appeased in order to even get in the door with them.

            I think it is important to note that while it is true that DiAngelo has been able to improve in her ability to communicate ideas about white supremacy and how it lives on today, she says herself that it is unlikely that an instructor who is black would have had the same success. What is most likely is that a black person would be viewed either unconsciously or consciously by white audiences as an outsider, especially those already struggling with racism in their workplace.