Oct
How the Pandemic Encouraged White Fragility
Last year I posted a statement on my personal Instagram account asking my white friends to remember to take a moment of silence and lament with our AAPI community after the Atlanta shootings. And instead of being silent or lamenting, many white people did just the opposite.
The comment section contained many white people stating their offense at this post. Their reasons were twofold. One, it was racist to only call out white people. Two, calling out white people specifically only further divided us as a population.
And I found myself asking “Why is this?” Why are we (I say we because I am white) so defensive? The goal of this Medium article is not to dissect the comments or their reasoning, but rather observe and question the motive behind them.
If you find yourself getting defensive when someone calls out your whiteness (I’m also guilty of this) I’m simply asking you to inquire where the defensiveness is coming from. I am not here to disqualify your feelings or discount your perspective. I’m here to ask the why being the what. Why do we feel defensive when asked to acknowledge our privilege?
We often interpret “privilege” to mean “You didn’t work hard” when we all know that’s not what the word means. Privilege simply means we never saw our whiteness as a drawback to our success. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
I believe the pandemic has done catastrophic damage to our ability to understand this and has pushed us further into a state of defensiveness.
That’s not to say there was no white privilege before the pandemic. The white voice has been the reigning voice for all of history, specifically, American history. Look at our Presidents, our Congress, our authors, our teachers, and our police force, all predominantly white until recently.
Look at our history of redlining, slavery, religious persecution of Muslims, and our placement of Japanese American people in internment camps during WWII. So let’s not pretend white privilege doesn’t exist. Let’s just own that right now and move on. If that’s something you feel like debating, I encourage you to have that conversation with a person of color and tell me how that ends.
But specifically over the last 2 years, we’ve seen an increased call for justice and equality, all while during a pandemic. Which I believe led to an increase in white fragility. Here’s why.
The last year has been a petri dish for conflict. For two main reasons.
One, because of the political and social tension that arose with the presidential election, the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and the storming of the capitol.
And two, the stay-at-home order that left all of us to our own devices when it came to processing a global pandemic and social unrest. Those two elements combined did not set anyone up well to have an informed opinion about anything. We saw what we wanted to see.
We heard what we wanted to hear. And we could not leave our homes to engage with those who might think differently than us. We were placed in the vacuum of our own homes at a time when we needed communal dialogue more than ever.
Some of you might be saying “No, I watch the news and I know what happened. I read the papers, I can make informed opinions.”
But could we acknowledge that our opinions would be more informed if they were developed in communities instead of in solitude? That’s all I’m asking here. For white people, for us to acknowledge that the last 2 years have been isolating and perhaps we’ve been able to isolate ourselves from the perspectives of those who live outside our immediate circle.
Mentally walk through your day-to-day routine. Over the last few years, how often did you talk with people of color? How often did you engage with people of different religions or political views? How often were you having deep conversations with people of a different economic status?
We’ve been left alone with our opinions for far too long.
And opinions formed in solitude lack the robust flavor of perspective.
Today, can we be a little softer with our words? A little warmer with our dialogue? And ask ourselves “What’s the worst that could happen if I admit I’m privileged?”
White friends, we have to stop making this about us. The fact that we get defensive when called out for our bias or privilege says a lot about our lack of familiarity with accountability. Acknowledging that our skin color has never hindered our success does not mean we didn’t work hard, it means we recognize that others have worked just as hard but have not received fair results.
Do not let your perspectives develop in a vacuum and do not let your opinions calcify into facts without exposing them to counter opinions and communal voices.
How the Pandemic Encouraged White Fragility was originally published in Lessons from History on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.