-My name is Misha Stone, and I'm a reader services
librarian in the Reader Services department,
and before we begin this evening,
I would like to acknowledge that we are gathered
together on the ancestral land of the Coast Salish people.
So together, let us honor their elders, past and present.
We thank them for their stewardship of this land.
Welcome to the library, and thank you for joining us
for this reading with Dr. Robin DiAngelo.
DiAngelo's essays and talks have been so important
and revelatory to me.
I know that I'll be reckoning with my own internalized racism,
with my own socialization
and trying to reduce harm throughout my entire life,
both personally and professionally,
and what I love about the book "White Fragility"
is that it crystallizes so much of what I've heard her say
and write all in one place in a way
that I can continue to move through it,
continue to reference it.
So I'm so honored to be here for the book launch
for "White Fragility."
So we're all here tonight for "White Fragility,"
and there's a lot of buzz about this book already.
It's only been out for 2 days, and I think it's a testament
to the fact that this topic's time has come.
Poet Claudia Rankine said,
"Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility'
brings language to the emotional structures
that make true discussions about racial attitudes difficult.
With clarity and compassion,
DiAngelo allows us to understand racism
as a practice not restricted to bad people.
In doing so, she moves our national discussions forward
with new rules of engagement."
And Michael Eric Dyson, who wrote the lovely forward,
called it a "vital, necessary book,
a bracing call to white folk
everywhere to see their whiteness for what it is
and seize the opportunity to make things better now."
Please welcome Dr. Robin DiAngelo.
-Woo!
Thank you so much.
Okay. That was such a rush.
Before I launch in, the way I'm going to do this is,
I'm going to read a little bit, riff a little bit,
kind of guide you along with some slides,
but I do want to reiterate that this talk is happening
on the ancestral territories of indigenous peoples,
and I believe very, very deeply
that if we don't know our history,
if we cannot trace the past into the present,
we cannot explain current conditions in ways
that are transformative rather than victim-blaming,
and I think today, it's very, very clear
when we see struggles around water rights at Standing Rock,
the Duwamish yet again denied federal recognition,
which denies treaty rights and sovereignty,
these struggles are never separated from the present.
At the same time, a piece of white fragility
is that white people are not taught their history.
We don't know our history, so I want to acknowledge that.
I want to position myself, of course, as a white person,
and I'm talking to a very...
addressing a very, very specific dynamic.
This is arguably the most complex,
nuanced social dilemma since the beginning of this country,
and there are myriad roads in, and all of them are essential,
but so consistently left off the table is whiteness, right?
So we often learn about this group and that group
and their struggles and their triumphs
and their heroes and heroines, and yet we don't ask ourselves,
"Struggles and triumphs in relation to whom?"
Right?
And so again, I'm going to focus on white folks and white people.
I do use humor,
and I want to say a little bit about why I use humor.
Some of it is my style, and also because there's so much tension
and so much anxiety and so much charge
and so much defensiveness and on and on
for white people around race that we can...
When we begin to get challenged,
we can shut down really quickly or glaze over or tune out,
and all of those, of course,
function to protect our positions
and hold our worldviews in place.
And so the laughter can help release some of that.
If we can laugh at this and mock it a little bit, to be direct,
it can help us then step back and not take ourselves
so seriously and hopefully again open it up,
and I want to say that defensiveness
this is killing people of color, right?
This is very, very serious, so my humor
is not meant to trivialize that,
but it is a strategy, one of many that I use in order
to try to air this out and open it up.
All right.
So I want to start by reading a bit from the beginning.
"White people in North America live in a society
that is deeply separate and unequal by race,
and white people are the beneficiaries
of that separation and inequality.
As a result, we are insulated from racial stress
at the same time that we come to feel entitled to
and deserving of our advantage.
Given how seldom we experience racial discomfort
in a society we dominate,
we haven't had to build our racial stamina.
Socialized into a deeply internalized
sense of superiority
that we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves,
we become highly fragile in conversations about race.
We consider a challenge to our racial worldviews as a challenge
to our very identities as good, moral people.
Thus, we perceive any attempt to connect us
to the system of racism
as an unsettling and unfair moral offense.
The smallest amount of racial stress is intolerable.
The mere suggestion that being white has meaning
often triggers a range of defensive responses,
and these include emotions such as anger,
fear and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation,
silence and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.
These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium
as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort
and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy.
I conceptualized this process as white fragility.
Though white fragility is triggered
by discomfort and anxiety,
it is born of superiority and entitlement.
White fragility is not weakness, per se.
In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control
and the protection of white advantage.
In my early days of work
of what was then termed a diversity trainer,
I was taken aback by how angry and defensive
so many white people became at the suggestion
that they were connected to racism in any way.
The very idea that they would be required
to attend a workshop on racism outraged them.
They entered the room angry
and made that feeling clear to us throughout the day
as they slammed their notebooks down on the table,
refused to participate in exercises
and argued against any and all points.
I couldn't understand their resentment or disinterest
in learning more about such a complex social dynamic
as racism.
These reactions were especially perplexing
when there were few or no people of color in their workplace
and they had the opportunity to learn
from my co-facilitator of color.
I assumed that in these circumstances,
an educational workshop on racism would be appreciated.
After all, didn't the lack of diversity indicate a problem
or at least suggest that some perspectives were missing
or that the participants might be undereducated about race
because of scant cross-racial interactions?
It took me several years to see beneath these reactions.
At first, I was intimidated by them,
and they held me back and kept me careful and quiet,
but over time, I began to see what lay beneath this anger
and resistance to discuss race or listen to people of color.
I observed consistent responses from a variety of participants.
For example, many white participants
who lived in white, suburban neighborhoods
and how no sustained relationships
with people of color were absolutely certain
that they held no racial prejudice or animosity.
Other participants simplistically reduced racism
to a matter of nice people versus mean people.
Most appeared to believe that racism ended in 1865
with the end of enslavement.
There was both knee-jerk defensiveness
about any suggestion that being white had meaning
and a refusal to acknowledge any advantage to being white.
And over time, I began to see
what I think of as the pillars of whiteness,
the unexamined beliefs that prop up our racial responses.
I could see the power of the belief
that only bad people were racist,
as well as how individualism allowed white people
to exempt themselves from the forces of socialization.
I could see how we are taught to think about racism
only as discrete acts committed by individual people
rather than as a complex, interconnected system,
and in light of so many white expressions of resentment
toward people of color,
I realize that we see ourselves as entitled to
and deserving of more than people of color deserve.
I saw our investment in a system that serves us.
I also saw how hard we work to deny all this
and how defensive we became when these dynamics were named.
In turn, I saw how our defensiveness
maintained the racial status quo."
Okay, and none of the white people that I identify,
whose actions I describe in this book,
would identify as racist.
"In fact, I think they would most likely identify
as racially progressive and vehemently
deny any complicity with racism,
yet all of their responses illustrate white fragility
and how it holds racism in place.
These responses spur the daily frustrations
and indignities people of color endure from white people
who see themselves as open-minded and thus not racist.
This book is intended for us,
for white progressives who so often,
despite our conscious intentions,
make life so difficult for people of color.
I believe that white progressives
cause the most daily damage to people of color,
and I define a white progressive
as any white person who thinks he or she
is not racist or is less racist or is in the choir
or already gets it. White progressives
can be the most difficult for people of color,"
because to the degree that we think we have it,
we're going to put all of our energy
into making sure you think that we have it and none of it
into what we need to be doing for the rest of our lives.
Right?
"White progressives do indeed uphold and perpetrate racism,
but our defensiveness and certitude
make it virtually impossible to explain to us how we do so."
So I'm pretty sure I'm speaking to a room
filled with white progressives, so let me just be clear.
You are not the choir.
There is no choir.
I am not the choir.
When I say there is no choir,
it's because my learning will never be finished,
and the moment I think I'm the choir,
I think I'm going to be done, and I'm going to have certitude.
I often joke, but on some levels, it's kind of true.
When I first applied to be that diversity trainer
back in the early '90s, I thought,
"Well, of course I'm qualified to lead discussions on racism.
I'm a vegetarian. How could I be racist?"
Now, I would need to be vegan today,
but, you know, in the '90s,
that was pretty alternative, right?
I even got called a communist once when I said,
"No, I'm a vegetarian."
But, you know, my point is, I just thought it was all about
open-mindedness and alternativeness,
and let me just say that, you know, I love Seattle,
and everything I learned about white fragility,
I learned here working with white progressives.
So chapter one, "Challenges to
Talking to White People About Racism."
Right?
I have never met a white person
who did not have an opinion on racism.
Have you?
If you are not sure that all white people
have opinions on racism, just bring it up the next time
you're around a bunch of white people,
maybe tonight when you have a drink in Ballard
after the talk and see how that goes.
Not only do we all have opinions,
but they tend to be very emotionally charged,
and that has nothing to do with whether they're informed or not.
I have an opinion on virtually everything.
That does not make them informed.
I don't believe you can grow up or spend
any significant time in the United States
without developing opinions on racism,
and they will be emotional and strongly held,
and again, that has nothing to do
with whether they're informed.
And, in fact, if you are white,
and you have not devoted years of sustained study,
struggle and focus on this topic,
your opinions are necessarily very limited,
and, no, a trip to Costa Rica,
multiracial nieces and nephews, right,
these are not sustained study, struggle and focus.
Now, how can I say that
when I don't know most of the people in this room?
And this, of course, is the first thing
that tends to trigger white fragility:
generalizing about white people.
As a sociologist, I'm really comfortable
generalizing about white people.
Social life is predictable and patterned,
you know, in really observable ways,
and we've got to grapple with those patterns,
but I can say this, that your opinions,
without sustained study, struggle, focus, you know,
mistake making, relationship building, repair,
they're superficial because nothing, nothing in society
gives you the information you need to have more than that.
In fact, you can get through graduate school in this country
without ever discussing racism, can you not?
You can get through teacher education in this country
without discussing racism,
and if you're in a progressive teacher-education program,
you'll have one required multicultural education class,
but that doesn't mean you'll be talking about racism.
You might just be talking about how to introduce ethnic authors
in February.
Right? You can get through law school.
You can through social work, right?
You can be seen as qualified to lead
a major or minor institution in this country,
to lead a group of people, to supervise people.
You can be seen as qualified to do those things
with virtually no ability whatsoever to engage
with any complexity or nuance in the issue of racism,
can you not?
All right.
So that is the first challenge: humility.
Right?
The second is individualism.
Apparently, white people do not understand socialization
because we really think that we are exempt from it,
and, of course, the irony of that
is because we're socialized to value the individual.
We put a lot of effort there, but we think that, you know,
just because I say I am or want to be,
I could be exempt from these forces.
So that is another challenge, and again, generalizing,
suggesting race has meaning for white people
will often trigger white fragility.
We think if we don't see it, it isn't there,
and, "You haven't explained it to me
yet enough so that I understand it,
so I'm not really sure that could be valid."
Right?
And we tend to use our reactions as a way out.
There is no way we're going to get where we need to go
from a place of white comfort,
and I am comfortable racially virtually 24/7,
so that is not my goal,
but we will often use that lack of comfort
as a sign that something's been done wrong
rather than something probably has been done right
and that we need to use that
as a way into the deeper framework
that would cause such upset rather than use it as a way out.
And we don't understand racism as a system,
so this is another key challenge which leads me to chapter two,
which is "Racism and White Supremacy."
Racism is a system, not an event, right?
And it's the system we're in, and none of us could be
and none of us were exempt from its forces, right?
But the way we're taught to think of racism functions
beautifully to not only obscure the system
but to exempt us from its forces, right,
or to have us believe we are exempted from its forces.
Now, as a white person,
I was raised to be racially illiterate,
and I actually think all white people are raised
to be racially illiterate in this culture,
and in gaining racial literacy, I have had to understand
not just the collective dynamics and dimensions of racism
but how racism impacts different groups
who are perceived and defined as people of color,
how it impacts them differently, right?
So not all peoples of color experience racism differently.
The things I have internalized about different groups
is different where and how they are positioned
always in relation to whiteness or far away from whiteness
and how that manifests, right?
All of that must be understood, but after a good 20-plus years
of talking day in and day out to white people about racism,
I feel very confident to say that there is something
profoundly antiblack in this culture
and that nothing seems to turn white people's
cranks of resentment like thinking
Black people got something over on us that they didn't deserve,
and the deeper belief is that they're inherently undeserving.
I believe in the white mind,
Black people are the ultimate racial other.
Right?
And that there are these bookends,
and again, your perceived proximity
to each end of that impacts
how you're going to experience your racialization,
so having said that
and not really having time to do history,
I just want to give you one glance
at the trajectory of antiblackness
in this country since its beginning,
and this slide will be deliberately dense.
We can literally think about it
as state-sanctioned organized crime that,
at least, discrimination against African-Americans
from the beginning, and it starts with kidnapping
and 300 years of enslavement, torture, rape and brutality,
and it carries on, and about a quarter of the way in,
you see bans on testifying against whites,
which made it technically legal to murder
Black people in this country, and you are now in my lifetime.
And I'm going to say it again
because a lot of white people seem to think a long time ago.
We're in my lifetime about a quarter of the way
through that slide.
And then we see, about two-thirds of the way
through, employment discrimination,
and we are in 2018 with copious empirical evidence.
Right?
So let's pick it up there: employment discrimination,
educational discrimination,
biased laws in policing practices,
white flight, subprime mortgages,
mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline,
disproportionate special-ed referrals and punishments,
testing, tracking, school funding,
biased media representation,
historic omissions and so much more.
It is a system, not an event.
It's the system we're in, and none of us could be
and none of us were exempt from its forces.
If we want to be unique and special individuals,
then we need to figure out how whatever we see
as special and different about us
set us up into that system because it did,
so I'm talking... I know white people really well.
I'm talking X, and you're like, "Ha! I was Y."
Right? Okay.
You were Y. Most whites are X.
How did Y set you up?
It did. Right?
The question is not if. It's how.
Okay.
I'm going to repeat it.
It's a system, not an event.
And how do we cope with the moral trauma
of what I just read to you?
Okay?
Resmaa Menakem has a beautiful book,
"My Grandmother's Hands,"
where he talks about racial trauma.
There's a trauma, I believe, to white people of racism,
but I don't think it's... It's a different...
It's a moral trauma, right?
And it's a piece of white fragility,
not being able to face our complicity in this system.
Well, historically, we projected our sins onto the Black body.
Right? Lazy, shiftless, criminal.
We projected our sins onto the Black body, right?
Today, in addition to doing that,
we obscure the system of racism that we uphold,
and we exempt ourselves from its forces, right?
And we do this in a way that appears to be progressive,
right, that race doesn't matter to us.
This is the board after the grand champion
"College Jeopardy!" round, right,
and for me, it just speaks volumes, right?
Not, again, knowing our history and being able to trace it
into the present is one of the volumes it speaks.
Another one is: That is the history of this country.
It is not their history.
It didn't happen in a vacuum.
One of the aspects of institutional power
is the ability to disseminate your worldview to everyone,
to position it as objective and universal, right,
and to tell the story, right, the story of the other
when we are not in relationship with the other, right?
So I want to give you an example of the power of the story,
and I want to do it through "The Jackie Robinson Story."
Y'all know Jackie Robinson, right?
So Jackie Robinson has been quite celebrated
for doing something.
What's the tagline that goes with Jackie Robinson?
He...He broke the color line, right?
Now, so let's do a little discourse analysis
because every year on the anniversary,
we celebrate him breaking the color line.
So think about what that invokes, right?
He was exceptional.
He was special.
He did it.
Finally, one of them had what it took
to break through and play with us.
Up until him, nobody had what it took,
so subtext: inferior group.
Right?
But he did it, and, of course, the day he did it,
the day he broke the color line, racism in sports ended.
So imagine if we told the story like this: Jackie Robinson,
the first Black man that whites allowed to play
Major League Baseball.
And I want you to notice the difference in that story.
One, that's the truth.
It didn't matter how exceptional he was,
and I actually don't believe he was the first most exceptional,
but if we didn't say he could play, he couldn't play.
If he walked out onto that field before we said,
"You can walk out on the field,"
the police would have removed him.
It wasn't up to him, right?
Now, the reason I want us to tell the story
the second way is, one, because it's true and, two,
because I need role models, right?
How did white people get organized?
What did they do behind the scene?
What barriers did they face, what challenges, right?
What strategies did they use,
and could we use any of those today
and adapt any of those today? Right?
It's not about me wanting to point out
how bad white people are.
So chapter three looks at racism after the civil rights movement,
and after the civil rights movement,
it made a brilliant adaptation, so post-civil rights,
racism got reduced to the following formula.
"A racist is an individual
who consciously does not like people based on race
and is intentionally mean to them,"
always an individual, must be conscious,
must be intentional,
and that definition exempts virtually all white people
from the system of racism.
This definition, I believe,
is the root of virtually all white defensiveness on racism.
Have you guys noticed any white defensiveness on racism?
Yeah.
It makes it virtually impossible
to talk to the average white person
about the inevitable absorption of a racist worldview
that we get from being socialized in a racist culture
in which white supremacy is the bedrock
because you suggest that anything I have done
is racially problematic in any way,
and I'm going to hear a question to my moral character,
and I'm going to need to defend my moral character.
You know, we've probably seen this a million times, right?
So that definition actually functions to protect racism
even as it looks like progress, right?
Racism became bad post-civil rights.
So this sets up what I think about
as the good-bad binary that kind of...
It's either or, right? Racists are bad.
Not racists are good,
and we know how to fill that in, don't we?
Ignorant, bigoted, prejudiced, mean-spirited, definitely old,
and when we die off, there'll be no more racism.
You know, I've been working with a lot of these tech companies
that when I walk around, I think to myself,
"God, I guess you have to be under 30 to work here,"
and I'm telling you, they cannot think critically about race,
and the people of color that work with these young people
are in so much pain, right?
No. I get asked all the time,
"Do you think young people today are less racist?"
Actually, the question usually begins with,
"Don't you think"... And just a head's up:
If you approach me with "Don't you think," the answer is no.
Because that's not an open question,
but, no, I don't actually think young people today
are less racist because that consciousness
hasn't changed our outcomes.
In fact, they're getting worse, right?
Okay.
So Southern for sure, don't you think?
Around here, I'm pretty sure they live in Fife.
I've never been to Fife,
but on the way to Tacoma, I see Fife.
I'm like, "Ooh, boy. It looks like racists live there."
And when I'm on my way up north, it's, like, Smokey Point.
Okay?
All right.
Not racists are good.
We're educated, progressive, open-minded, well-intended.
We're young. We're northern.
We live on Phinney Ridge,
but we're all moving to Portland really soon because Whole Foods
is so corporate now.
Again, this is the root
of virtually all white defensiveness,
and it just functions so beautifully to exempt us,
so we just have to get rid of it,
and when white people hear me, and they feel angry
and pissed off and defensive, can I just say this?
Now that you guys are listening to me up here,
when you laugh at my jokes,
I'm going to keep getting looser and looser.
Damn, white people are pissy about racism.
We are so pissy on this topic.
We're mean on this topic, right?
And so if you're sitting here feeling that,
just see if it isn't rooted in this definition,
and if you cannot let go of this,
you're just not going to be able to move forward.
All right.
So aversive racism is a form
of what sociologists call new racism, right?
And so it's racism that progressive whites
are most likely to hold,
but because it conflicts with our identities as good people,
we're most likely to be in denial about it.
So let me find that piece.
"It's a manifestation of racism that well-intentioned people
who see themselves as educated and progressive
are more likely to exhibit.
It exists under the surface of consciousness
because it conflicts with consciously held beliefs
of racial equity and justice.
Aversive racism is a subtle but insidious form
as aversive racists enact racism in ways
that allow them to maintain a positive self-image, e.g.
'I have lots of friends of color.
I judge people by the content of their character,
not the color of their skin,' and whites enact racism
while maintaining a positive self-image in many ways,
for example: rationalizing racial segregation
as unfortunate but necessary to access good schools,
rationalizing that our workplaces
are virtually all white
because people of color just don't apply,
avoiding direct racial language and using racially coded terms
such as urban, underprivileged, diverse,
sketchy and good neighborhoods,
denying that we have few cross-racial relationships
by proclaiming how diverse our community or workplace
is and attributing inequality between whites
and people of color to causes other than racism.
Consider a conversation I had with a white friend.
She was telling me about a white couple
who she knew who had just moved to New Orleans
and bought a house for a mere $25,000.
'Of course,' she immediately added,
they also had to buy a gun,
'and Joan is afraid to leave the house.'
I immediately knew they had bought a home
in a Black neighborhood.
This was a moment of white racial bonding
between this couple who shared this story of racial danger
and my friend,
and then between my friend and me as she repeated the story.
Through this tale, the four of us fortified
familiar images of the horror of Black space
and drew boundaries between us and them
without ever having to directly name race
or openly express our disdain for Black space.
Notice that the need for a gun is a key part of this story.
It would not have the degree of social capital it holds
if the emphasis were on the price of the house alone.
Rather, the story's emotional power rests
on why a house would be that cheap
because it's in a Black neighborhood
where white people literally might not get out alive,
yet while very negative
and stereotypical representations of Blacks
were reinforced in that exchange,
not naming race provided plausible deniability.
In fact, in preparing to share this incident,
I texted my friend and asked her the name of the city her friends
had moved to.
I also wanted to confirm my assumption
that she was talking about a Black neighborhood."
I share the text exchange here.
"Hey, what city did you say your friends
had bought a house in for $25,000?"
She replies, "New Orleans.
They said they live in a very bad neighborhood,
and they each have to have a gun to protect themselves.
I wouldn't pay $0.05 for that neighborhood."
I reply, "I assume it's a Black neighborhood?"
"Yes, you get what you pay for. I'd rather pay 500,000
and live somewhere where I wasn't afraid."
I reply, "I wasn't asking because I want to live there.
I'm writing about this in my book,
the way that white people talk about race
without ever coming out and talking about race."
She had a very interesting response to that.
"I wouldn't want you to live there
because it's too far away from me."
Notice that when I simply ask what city the house is in,
she repeats the story about the neighborhood being so bad
that her friends need guns.
When I ask if the neighborhood is Black,
she is comfortable confirming that it is,
but when I tell her that I'm interested
in how whites talk about race
without talking about race, she switches the narrative.
Now, her concern is about not wanting me to live so far away.
This is a classic example of aversive racism,
holding deep racial disdain that surfaces in daily discourse
but not being able to admit it
because the disdain conflicts with our self-image
and professed beliefs.
Now, readers may be asking themselves,
"But if the neighborhood is really dangerous,
why is acknowledging this danger a sign of racism?"
Research in implicit bias
has shown that perceptions of criminal activity
are influenced by race.
White people will perceive dangers
simply by the presence of Black people.
We cannot trust our perceptions when it comes to race and crime,
but regardless of whether the neighborhood is actually more
or less dangerous than other neighborhoods,
what is salient about this exchange
is how it functions racially
and what that means for the white people engaged in it.
For my friend and me,
this conversation did not increase
our awareness of the danger of some specific neighborhood.
Rather, the exchange reinforced our fundamental beliefs
about Black people.
Toni Morrison uses the term race talk to capture, quote,
"the explicit insertion into everyday life of racial signs
and symbols that have no meaning
other than positioning African Americans
into the lowest level of the racial hierarchy," unquote.
Casual race talk is a key component of white racial
framing because it accomplishes the interconnected goals
of elevating whites while demeaning people of color.
Race talk always implies a racial us and them.
So folks who have seen me present before know
that I use this metaphor,
and I do tend to think in metaphors,
and as I do the work that I do,
and I talk on a daily basis to white people,
I literally got this image in my mind of a dock or a pier,
and what it signifies for me are two things.
One, how surface or superficial our narratives are,
but also the dock, if you look from above,
appears to be floating on the water, but it's not.
There is an entire structure submerged under the water
that props that dock up.
It rests on literally pillars anchored into the ocean floor,
and everything I do in my work
is trying to get us off the top of the dock
and under there to examine those pillars
because despite all the bull...
on top of the dock, our outcomes have not changed.
All right?
So we have to ask ourself, "What's going on?"
All right?
So as I listen to these narratives,
I think about them in two overall categories:
color-blind and color-celebrate. Right?
So let's start with the first set: color-blind.
Probably the number one color-blind racial narrative is,
"I was taught to treat everyone the same."
Anybody ever heard that one?
Okay.
Let me just tell you, when I hear this from a white person,
and I hear it frequently, there's a bubble over my head,
and it has a few things in it.
The first thing is, "Oh, this person
doesn't understand basic socialization.
This person doesn't understand culture.
Ooh, this person is not particularly self-aware, right?"
And I need to give a heads-up to the white folks in the room.
When people of color hear us say this,
they're generally not thinking, "All right.
I am talking to a woke white person right now."
Usually some form of eye-rolling,
and actually, it recently cofacilitated
with a Black woman who said,
"That is the most dangerous white person to me."
Okay?
So it's not functioning the way we think it is,
and this is another piece of humility for us.
We are the least qualified to determine
whether we understand this or not.
All right?
Because so often the things that we think convey
that are not conveying that,
and all of these are within that, you know,
"It's in the past, just everyone struggles.
My parents weren't racist. That's why I'm not racist.
Oh, my parents were racist. That's why I'm not racist."
It doesn't matter, really, what we say first.
What comes next must be, "I'm not racist."
So-and-so just happened to be, but it has nothing
to do with race, and it also has nothing to do
with why no one in the office gets along with her.
And this is another one I actually ask white folks
to remove from their vocabulary,
oh, by the way, along with reverse racism,
which there's no such thing.
All right? Right?
Remove from your vocabulary
anything on the topic of race that begins with,
"Just happened to be, regardless,"
including that your neighborhood just happened to be white.
All right?
"Yes, but at the human level,"
when we make that move, right, get race off the table,
and let's position some kind of shared universal experience.
There isn't one in this physical plane that we live in,
in a society deeply separate and unequal by race, right?
So I call these color-blind because they basically say,
"I don't see it, and if I see it,
it has no meaning."
And there's a question that has never failed me in my efforts
to uncover how we pull this off, right, and that question is not,
"Is this true, or is this false?"
because if we apply that question,
we're going to argue and argue and argue.
The question that has never failed me is,
"How do these narratives function in the conversation?
How does it function?" and if we ask that question,
we can see that all of these narratives function
to exempt the person from any part of the problem.
All of them take race off the table.
All of them close rather than open the exploration,
and in doing that, all of them protect
the current racial hierarchy
and the white position within it.
It doesn't have to be your intention,
and I'll just be blunt.
I'm not interested in your intention.
I'm interested in how this functions.
What is the impact of these narratives?
They are closers, not openers.
Well, probably the folks in this room,
we're beyond color blindness, right?
What do we say?
Right?
Where's my little clicker?
Here it is, okay.
Hm.
We say things like this,
"Oh, I work in a very diverse environment."
If we can't say that, and many of us can't,
we'll come up with some kind of proximity, okay?
"I have people of color in my family. Me?
I'm not racist. I used to live in New York."
This one will get used interchangeably with,
"I'm not racist. I'm from Canada.
I'm not racist. I'm from Hawaii. I'm not racist.
I'm from Europe. I'm not racist. I was in the military."
Apparently, there are no racism in any of those places.
When I hear that one, "I used to live in New York,"
I always think, "Oh, my God, you walked by people of color
and didn't lose your shit?
That's amazing."
Okay, so how many of you,
in a conversation with a white person,
have heard some version of those narratives right there,
those three?
Okay. Right?
And if we're going to be really honest,
we've said some version of these narratives, right?
That last one, sociologists actually have a term for it.
It's called the inoculation case.
"I've been near people of color,
and it stripped me of my racism."
And I want you to notice
how often white people invoke proximity as evidence.
This is important because it helps reveal
what's under the dock.
It helps reveal what we think racism is,
that we would invoke proximity to show that we're not racist,
and I need to understand what I think racism is
if I'm going to impact my role in it, right?
So let's do some discourse analysis.
Let's think critically about these three narratives.
When a white person invokes one of these narratives
in a conversation about racism,
they're giving you their evidence, right?
Racism comes up. I say this.
This is my evidence.
In my mind, what's that "my evidence" of?
What do I want to make sure you know?
-You're not racist. -I'm not racist.
Right?
So in order to be good evidence,
it must distinguish me from a racist.
So apparently, a racist cannot do these things,
or this wouldn't be good evidence.
So a racist cannot work three cubicles
down from a person of color,
could not have people of color in their family
and would find living in New York intolerable
even though I could think of at least one racist
that lives in New York, so...
Now, I have yet to let go of that little joke
because I do enjoy it,
but it does rest on the good/bad binary.
I'm on the same continuum the person I'm thinking of is on.
Just want to be clear about that.
Okay, so I'm going to just ask a rhetorical question
to the people of color in this room,
and I'm going to look at my dear friend
Aisha over there and Paula.
And I'm going to say,
"Could a racist work three cubicles down from you?"
Hell yes.
Right?
People of color, do you have white people in your life
who you love deeply and who, on occasion,
reveal their internalized racial superiority...
-Yes. -...
their internalized racist assumptions about the world?
-Yes. -Yup.
-White people, do you hear that?
Could you even be married to them...
-Yup. -Yeah.
-...and they could still...
It doesn't disappear the day they fall in love with you?
Okay.
Right?
So I hope we...
I mock it a bit because it's ridiculous, right?
But it's so ubiquitous,
so we really just got to ask ourselves,
"What do I think it is, and what am I saying,
and how is that functioning, right?"
And clearly, this rests on that simplistic definition.
Apparently, a lot of white people think
that a racist cannot tolerate any proximity,
even the sight of people of color,
and so if there's any friendliness across race,
there cannot be racism.
This is another thing that makes us so difficult
in these conversations, right?
So I'm just going to put it right out here.
As a result of being born and raised as a white person
in this culture, I have a racist worldview.
I have deep, racist biases.
I have developed racist patterns,
and I have investments in a system
that has served me very well and is very comfortable for me,
and it really helped me get over sexist
and classism that I struggle with.
And I also have investments in not seeing any of that,
for what it would mean for my identity
and what it would require of me in action, right?
I can choose it. Don't want it.
Got it.
And it's actually incredibly transformative
and liberating to begin from that premise
so that you can begin to think,
"Well, how is it coming out in me?"
so that I might be able to stop that or ameliorate
that rather than, "It's not coming out in me."
I sometimes think, if I went into the bathroom,
and I came out, and the back of my dress
was hiked into my pantyhose,
and my ass was showing, I sure hope you'd let me know.
And I wouldn't say to you,
"How dare you suggest my ass is showing?
And you better proceed as if it isn't!"
And yet the worst fear of a white progressive
is that we're going to say or do something racist,
but, "By God, don't you dare say
that I just said or did something racist,"
rather than, "Thank you. I didn't see myself doing that,
and now I can do something different."
All right.
"I was in the Peace Corps. I marched in the '60s.
I voted for Obama. I'm on the Equity Team."
Okay, go on.
I already know all this. I told you.
I've been to Costa Rica and tutored there
for a week with the little children,
and this is a real Seattle one.
"We don't like how white our neighborhood is,
but we had to move here for the schools.
What could we do?"
I think it's very disingenuous.
I think we do like how white our neighborhoods are,
and that's another conversation.
Right? So these are not color-blind.
These are color-celebrate.
I love it, right?
And I'm going to just say this.
I love it in the right doses.
I like it in the Montessori School
with the children of the international workers
that come from Microsoft.
Right?
So again, if we apply the same question,
not true, fault or right, wrong,
but how do these narratives function in the conversation?
We get the same answer.
They all exempt the person from any part of the problem.
They all take race off the table.
They all close rather than open,
and they all protect the current racial hierarchy
and the white position within it.
They're actually in practice and impact,
not any more progressive,
and they have not changed our outcomes.
So we have to get under here and see what's going on,
and what I think is going on,
what I think of as the linchpins of new racism, right,
is the good/bad binary, man, that one is really effective;
deep, implicit bias, which you can't help but absorb,
this precious ideology of individualism.
At the same time, this idea that we don't speak
from any particular position but speak for all of humanity,
and people of color speak for their group,
and when we're interested in hearing about that,
we'll ask them, but we'll cover everything else, right?
Any people of color get asked to be on the Equity Team
automatically when it's not even necessarily your interest or...
Okay.
Internalized superiority, which you cannot help
but you have if you are raised white in this culture,
and in some level and investment of not seeing this,
and finally, the power of segregation
to hold it all in place.
I think, for me, the most profound message of all
is that I could call a white neighborhood good.
I could call a school filled with all white teachers
and white children a good school,
but the fundamental message is that there's no inherent value
in the perspectives or experiences of people of color.
So these messages are raining down on us relentlessly, 24-7,
and we don't have umbrellas, and nothing could,
and nothing did exempt us from their forces.
It's on us to figure out how they shape us, not if.
All right?
So all of this sets up some patterns.
All right?
Preference for racial segregation,
lack of understanding what racism is,
seeing ourselves as individuals,
not understanding that we bring our history with us.
History matters.
It's a history of harm.
Assuming everyone is having our experience, arrogance,
lack of humility, unwillingness to listen,
dismissing what we don't understand,
apathy towards racial justice.
After, again, 20-plus years, I think most white people
are pretty apathetic about racial injustice.
Inability to or lack of interest
in sustaining relationships with people of color,
wanting to jump over the the hard personal work
and get to solutions,
confusing not agreeing with not understanding.
Is it possible that you're not actually informed
enough to disagree?
Have you ever had someone say, "No, you misunderstood.
No, you misunderstood."
What if the person understood you perfectly,
in fact, they even understood what you meant,
and you don't understand how what you meant
comes from a racist framework?
Right?
A need to maintain white solidarity, right?
That's the unspoken agreement amongst white people
that we'll keep each other comfortable around our racism.
Highest priority is saving face.
I always like to say...
When I do a caucus group or something,
and the white people are afraid I might think they're racist,
I think you're racist.
I do because I think I am, too, right?
But, yeah, let's be done with that.
And actually, your carefulness and your hiding yourself
and your not contributing to the conversation
won't actually change that assessment at all,
and people of color don't find that to build trust.
Right?
Defensiveness, of course,
and a focus on intentions over impact,
so when any of this is triggered,
we get off our white racial equilibrium.
Right?
So what is white racial equilibrium?
Well, racial comfort, that's for sure,
seeing ourselves as individuals,
seeing ourselves as just human, obliviousness.
Well, it's this funny...
There's a stew inside of white people
that makes us really irrational on this topic,
and I've tried to kind of identify some of those pieces,
but one if them is that we really
are taught not to see this.
So if you're a person of color scratching your head thinking,
"How can they not see this?
I just don't believe they don't see this."
We actually really don't see it.
Oh, and, hell yes, we know it.
And we do see it, but we cannot admit that.
Both these things are actually true.
We don't see it, and we do see it but can't admit to it.
And it's part of what makes us so irrational, right?
Apathy, dominance, control.
I'm working on this huge contract with racial justice
for a large organization,
and they asked us to take the word white
out of all the slides.
That's a great example, isn't it, of white fragility?
So don't name white.
Don't name...
That's our racial equilibrium, right?
And entitlement to people of color's bodies...
-Yes!
-Russell Minnikin talks about...
It's really been only in the last couple of decades
that people of color have had dominion over their own bodies.
And so entitlement to people of color's bodies
comes out in lots of ways, right,
from just violating the space to touching the bodies,
to expecting you to carry the emotional burden of race,
all of that, but you want to know,
for me, a really great example of the white fragility triggered
when my entitlement or white entitlement to Black bodies
is a man quietly,
solemnly and respectfully going on one knee,
and the eruption, right, the criminalization, right?
The great example of white fragility
connected to this last bullet here
is the eruption of umbrage and criminalization
when a Black man simply went down on one knee respectfully.
Talking about Colin Kaepernick, what an example!
So what interrupts our racial equilibrium?
Well, if you challenge objectivity,
if you talk openly about race, all right,
if you challenge white entitlement to racial comfort,
if you challenge the expectation that people of color
will serve us and do our work for us,
if you break with white solidarity,
you challenge white racial innocence.
Right? Oh, and by the way,
you can download all this on handouts from my website.
Oh, oh, wait a minute, and it's in the book.
It's in the book.
Right?
Challenge to individualism, challenge to meritocracy,
challenge to white authority,
all right, challenge to white centrality,
challenge to universalism, right, suggesting that maybe,
in fact, we don't speak for all of humanity.
We speak from a particular perspective,
and it's deeply limited, okay?
So this leads to white fragility.
And we actually have the poster boy for white fragility
right here in the front row because I'm married to him,
and I made him pose in the kitchen.
And he's like, "Everyone is going to think
I'm an asshole now!"
I'm like, "Mm-hmm. Yeah, they are."
Open the dictionary. Look up "white fragility."
They're going to see your picture.
Okay, so back to something more serious.
Right? I couldn't resist.
So when all of this insular,
coddled environment builds an inability to bear witness,
an inability to have capacity to hold the discomfort,
I've been thinking lately that part
of what it means to be white is to never have to bear witness
to the pain of racism on people of color
and never having to bear witness to the pain
I've caused to people of color,
never having to be accountable to that pain, all right,
and all the ways that I push off accountability, right?
And so when I thought of this term "white fragility,"
the fragility part, we're fragile in that
we can barely tolerate the slightest challenge, right?
I mean, I'll show you my e-mails.
Just the suggestion that being white has meaning
will set us off, but there's a continuum.
And so we're fragile in that way,
but it's not fragile at all in its impact.
It's really effective, right?
"I need you to stop. I need to get back into my position
and my entitlement and my comfort,
and I will do what I need to do to get you to stop."
And I think that white fragility functions
as a kind of white racial bullying.
We make it so miserable for people of color
to talk to us about their experiences,
to call us in, that most of the time they don't
because it's not worth getting punished more.
Trust me.
They take home so much of it because it so rarely goes well.
Right?
And I'm just going to ask a rhetorical question
to people of color in the room.
How often have you tried to talk to white people
about our inevitable and often racist behaviors
and have that go well for you? Okay.
I mean, literally, not even once, right?
And so it's weaponized defensiveness.
It's weaponized hurt feelings.
It's weaponized denial and obliviousness,
and so I'm not the 1 percent.
I've never even been a manager,
but I can control the people of color
in my orbit through white fragility, right?
And so I also think of it
as a form of everyday white racial control.
"You can be in my orbit,
and I'll use you as diversity cover
as long as you keep me comfortable.
But if you challenge me, you're going to become
a personal problem, and you're going to be ejected,"
and, boy, do we see this in the workplace.
"We want you on the committee.
We're not going to pay you anymore,
but we do want you on the committee
as long as you don't actually do
what we asked you to be on the committee to do."
-Yes. -Right.
Right?
Oh, I got to read a piece from 112.
I got a story that I really want to read.
Okay.
"So I was working with a group of educators
who had been meeting regularly for at least eight sessions.
The group was composed of the equity teams
for a public school system, self-selected by people
who wanted to support equity efforts in their schools.
I had just finished an hour-long presentation titled
Seeing the Water: Whiteness in Daily Life.'
This presentation is designed to make visible
the relentless messages of white superiority, et cetera.
The room appeared to be with me,
open and receptive with many nodding along in agreement.
Then a white teacher raised her hand
and told a story about an interaction
she had as she drove alongside a group of parents
protesting the achievement gap in her school,
and she then proceeded to imitate one mother
in particular who offended her.
'You don't understand our children,'
this mother had called out to her as she drove by.
By the stereotypical way that the white teacher
imitated the mother, we all knew that the mother was Black.
The room seemed to collectively hold its breath
at her imitation, which was bordering on racial mockery.
While the teacher's concluding point was that on reflection,
she came to realize that the mother was right
and that she really didn't understand children of color,
the emotional thrust of the story
was her umbrage at the mother for making this assumption.
For the room, the emotional impact
was on her stereotypical imitation
of an angry Black woman.
As this story came to a close, I had a decision to make.
Should I act with integrity
and point out what was racially problematic about this story?
After all, making racism visible
was literally what I had been hired to do.
Further, several African American teachers
in the room had certainly noticed
the reinforcement of a racist stereotype.
To not intervene would be, yet again, another white person
choosing to protect white feelings
rather than interrupt racism,
a white person who built herself as a racial-justice consultant,
no less, yet I would be taking the risk of losing the group,
given the likelihood that the woman would become defensive,
shut down, and the room would split into those
who thought I had mistreated her and those who didn't."
This happens every time you actually call it out
in the moment in the room, right?
And I decided to do what would maintain my integrity,
and I called it out,
and I called it out as diplomatically as I could.
I just said, "Ooh, you know, teachable moment,
I'm going to ask you not to tell that story again.
Here's why. Here's how you could tell it
in a way that doesn't reinforce that."
We went back and forth a little bit,
to make a long story short, of course,
the room did erupt in twos.
She left the group.
She quit the group.
This was the eighth session for the equity teams,
and again, all the focus was on,
"How'd I or how didn't I mistreated her?"
All right? And this is often what happens.
So whites receiving feedback above and below, right,
what feelings do white people have when we often try
to give them feedback on our racist patterns, right?
Tell me if you don't recognize these:
attacked, silenced, shamed, accused, insulted,
judged, angry, scared, outraged.
Yeah?
Now, how do we act when we feel this way?
Right?
Well, we withdraw.
We cry.
We go silent.
We argue. We deny.
We focus on our intentions.
We seek forgiveness.
We explain.
We insist there was a misunderstanding.
Right?
And so what kind of claims do we make
to justify behaving this way and feeling this way?
"I know people of color. I marched in the '60s.
I took this in college. I was a minority in Japan.
The real oppression is class. You misunderstood me.
You're playing the race card.
If you knew me or understood me, you'd know I can't be racist.
This is not welcoming to me. You're making me feel guilty."
I want to say something about shame.
Whenever white people jump to a narrative
really quickly on racism, I'm always suspicious of it,
and shame is one we jump to really fast.
white progressives really,
really like to lean on how much racial shame they feel,
and I would actually ask you to think about on a daily basis,
how often do you, if you are white, feel racial shame?
Seriously.
Well, first of all, probably just when racism comes up,
and even then?
So maybe 2 percent of the time?
Right?
"I was in New York recently,
and I stepped over a homeless man
who was Black on my way into Whole Foods,
and I felt shame for just a minute.
But then Rainier cherries are in season,
and I forgot all about it."
I'm serious.
That's how that functions.
I really don't think we feel that shame that much,
but even if we do, then you have to ask yourself,
"How is it functioning?"
What does it do for you?
What is the cultural capital that you get from that?
And if you can't answer that it's somehow
moving you forward in your anti-racist efforts,
then you're going to have to get through it.
Right?
Okay.
"It's just one little, innocent thing."
Some people find offense.
"You hurt my feelings. This is political correctness.
I don't feel safe."
I'll just really quickly say, the word safe coming
out of the mouths of white people
on the topic of racism is illegitimate.
Because what does safety mean from a position
from social, historical, institutional,
cultural power and privilege?
No, it's generally, "We don't feel comfortable,"
but that doesn't have as much cultural capital.
It's not as precious.
"The problem is your tone,
and I know what it is to be oppressed."
So if we think about the dock, right, the feelings,
the behaviors, the claims,
what could be the underlying assumptions
that would lead us to make these claims, right?
"Well, as a white person, I will be the judge
of whether racism has occurred.
My learning is finished. I know all I need to know.
Racism can only be intentional.
Not having intended it cancels it out.
White people who experience another form of oppression
can't experience racial privilege.
If I'm a good person, I can't be racist.
My unexamined perspective is equal to an informed one.
I'm entitled to remain comfortable,
so you have made a very serious social breach.
As a white person, I know the best way to challenge racism,
and you're doing it wrong. Nice people cannot be racist.
If I can't see it, it's not legitimate.
If I have any proximity to people of color,
I can't be racist.
If I have no proximity to people of color,
I can't be racist because I'm racially innocent."
I would make a case that white people
who grew up on farms and rural environments
where there are no people of color around
actually are less sheltered from racism
because you are left to rely on the most problematic sources
for your understanding of people of color.
"My worldview is objective, and yours isn't."
I don't know what else could be functioning under there, right?
So how does all that function?
Maintains white solidarity, closes off self-reflection,
minimizes, silences the discussion,
makes white people the victims, protects limited worldview,
takes race off the table,
focuses on the messenger, not the message,
rallies more resources to white people, protects racism.
I could get into this really deep,
but here is what I want to say about this.
The reason I like this picture when I do presentation
is because,
for me, this is an amplified visual of institutional power,
and if I walked in that room as a woman
because that would be the salient identity
for me in that room,
it would be visceral to me the lifetime of entitlement
exuding out of these men's pores, right?
And so if you can see that,
if you can see not only the lifetime of entitlement,
but if you were to suggest to them
that maybe they should have some women
or people of color in that group, I can't know,
but I believe to my core they would feel contempt
because they don't see the perspectives of women
and people of color as valuable.
I believe that to my core.
I don't know them, but I'm pretty damn sure.
If I can see it in them, then...
And I don't relate to them, right?
But what version of that is coming from my pores?
What version of that is visceral for people of color
when I'm in the room, right?
So...
Women of color, you want to be the one that goes in there
and helps those white women see their racism?
Does that sound good, all by yourself?
They need some diversity.
All right.
So my point is, I can be in this room
experiencing sexism and patriarchy,
and I can be in this room perpetrating racism, right?
white women don't actually land
any more softly on people of color,
and I think when we don't back people of color,
the betrayal and the hurt is deeper
because we have a potential way in,
and we use it often as a way out.
If you don't think I'm an angry feminist,
ask the poster boy for white fragility over here.
But our resentment about sexism can cause us
to not back people of color
and actually collude with the benefits of whiteness
to get a little bit ahead, right?
Okay.
So I'm going to end by just bringing this question up
so that I can preempt it
because I really don't like this question.
And if this is the question you have right now, if you're white,
and this is the question you have right now,
then I have one for you.
What has allowed you to remain ignorant
about how to interrupt racism?
Why, in 2018, is that your question?
And that's actually a sincere, challenging question
because if you really start to map it out,
you'll have your answer.
So I want to share what could be under that dock
if we had a transformed framework,
but before I do it, I want to give an example
of a moment of racism
that I recently perpetrated, okay?
Instead of reading it from the book...
It is written in the book, but it's easier for me
to just say it.
I used to be the director of equity for a large nonprofit,
and on the equity team were three people, myself,
the co-director and executive assistant.
And Debra and Marsha were Black women,
so there were three of us. Two of us were Black.
One was white, and we hired a consultant.
The organization hired a consultant to come in
and design the website,
and so she was going around setting meetings
with all the departments to find out what we did
so she could build each department's particular page.
So she scheduled a meeting with the equity team,
and it was 3 in the afternoon.
And we went in, and it turns out that she was also a Black woman.
I will call her Angela, and right away,
she had this survey that had lots of questions
about what we do, but it was the afternoon.
I found the survey kind of annoying, and it was tedious,
and it didn't really speak to what we do.
So I kind of shoved it aside, and I said, "Let me explain.
We go out into the different satellite offices,
and we lead racial justice trainings."
In fact, we went up to the far north one recently,
and Debra was asked not to come back.
I guess her hair scared the white people.
I make this little joke, right,
because Debra has long locked hair.
The meeting ends, and I wish I could tell you
that I realized what I had said, but I didn't.
So a few days later, Marsha came to me and said,
"Angela was really offended by that joke you made
about Black women's hair."
I know better, right?
And so I immediately understood and said,
"Thank you for letting me know."
And so I followed a series of steps to repair that,
and the first thing I did is I called a friend of mine,
another white woman named Christine, and said,
"I need to process something with you."
And I vented my anxiety, my embarrassment,
and then when I kind of got that off,
we put our heads together, and it's like,
"Let's think about how your racism
was manifesting in that meeting. Get really clear, okay?"
I got clear, and I felt ready to then come back to Angela.
So I called her, and I said,
"Would you be willing to grant me
the opportunity to repair the racism
I perpetrated towards you in the meeting last week?"
And she said, "Yes."
Now, she could've said, "No," and I was prepared.
In fact, I thought she was going to say, "No."
I thought she was going to say, "Whoa, are you a hypocrite?"
and if I could not hold that, then I was not going to be
making an authentic repair, right?
So she didn't say, "No," however.
She said, "Yes."
And so we met, and I said,
"I just want to own that racism and that joke."
And so we talked about it, and she basically said,
"I don't know you. I have no relationship with you.
I have no trust with you,
and I do not want to be joking about Black women's hair
in a professional work meeting with a white woman
I don't know." Right?
I just want to be really clear so that white folks understand
that piece of it.
The other piece that I owned was that in my cockiness,
I was being the woke white person
and making fun of the white people who didn't get it,
so I was making that move.
I was credentialing myself, so I owned that.
And then because I knew that Christine and I,
as two white people,
would probably have missed some things,
I said, "Angela, is there anything I missed?"
And she said, "Yes.
That survey you so glibly shoved aside,
I wrote that survey, and I have spent my life
justifying my intelligence to white people."
Okay, that was just like a... because I immediately got it.
It never occurred to me she wrote the survey,
and then looking back at how I just dismissed it,
so I owned that.
I apologized, and then next step I took was,
"Is there anything else that needs to be said
or heard that we might move forward?"
And she said, "Yes.
The next time you run your racism at me"...
I want to pause right there.
Notice that she didn't say, "if."
She basically said, "If we're going to be working together,
I know you're going to run your racism at me again,
so the next time you do it,
would you like your feedback publicly or privately?"
Yeah, I loved her for that, and I said,
"Oh, publicly, definitely," right?
I think most white people would've said,
"Oh, God, no, privately," but it's really, really...
I told her, "It's really important that
other white people see that I am now free of these patterns."
I run them less.
I'm not defensive when I run them.
Notice I never explain my intentions.
I have very good repair skills, but I have these patterns,
and it's important that other white people see that
and that I have the opportunity to model non-defensiveness.
"And so anything else?" "Nope."
"Are we good?" "Yep, let's move on."
And we moved on, and actually, there was more trust there
because one of the things she said to me is,
"What you did in that meeting happens to us every day.
This what you're doing right now, this does not happen.
Thank you.
What I'm looking for is, where can I go with you?" right?
Repair.
So I want to end with what could be under that dock
if we had a transformed frame
because we can't get where we need to go
from where we are right now.
Right?
Being good or bad is not relevant.
All right?
Racism is a multilayered system infused in everything.
whites have blinders on racism.
I have blinders on racism.
Racism is complex.
I don't have to understand it in order for it to be valid.
white comfort maintains the racial status quo.
Discomfort is necessary and important.
I must not confuse comfort with safety.
I am safe in discussions of race.
The anecdote to guilt is action.
I bring my group's history with me.
History matters.
I might see myself as just an individual.
The people of color in my life see me as a white individual.
The question is not if but how.
Nothing exempts me from the forces of racism.
Whites are unconsciously invested in racism.
I am unconsciously invested in racism.
I want you to imagine,
if white people internalized this framework,
how revolutionary it would be.
Right?
Bias is implicit.
I don't expect to be aware of mine
without a lot of effort.
Right?
Feedback from people of color indicates trust
because it is a huge moment of risk
across a deep history of harm.
Right?
Feedback on white racism is really difficult to give.
How I receive it is not as relevant as the feedback itself.
If you bring it to me upset, bring it to me upset.
There are no rules for how you should tell me
that I've harmed you.
It takes courage to break with white solidarity.
How can I support those that do? How can I back?
If I'm not willing to step out and take a risk,
how can I back other white people
who do instead of tearing them down,
finding that one thing that I said in this talk tonight
that you can grab onto
so that you don't have to look at yourself?
Given socialization, it's more likely that
I am the one who doesn't understand the issue.
Can you imagine if white people were coming from that place?
Racism hurts, even kills, people of color 24-7.
Interrupting it is more important than my feelings,
ego or self-image.
Thank you.
I only have time for two questions,
so here's the one I'm going to answer.
"Will your book be available in audio?"
Yes.
Okay, this one, "How can a person of color
navigate around white fragility
in the workplace when direct confrontation
usually ends in retaliation?"
Yeah, I mean, the first I just want white people to understand,
how much psychic and emotional labor
people of color go through to walk on eggshells around us.
You know, white people so bitterly complain,
"Oh, you mean I can't say anything anymore?
I have to walk on eggshells?"
Please, the emotional labor
and the knots people of color tie themselves into,
so they don't trigger us: It is just heart-wrenching.
And so I guess the first thing I want to say is,
I want us to knock this nonsense off
so that this doesn't have to be the question,
but it is the question.
So there are different strategies.
I actually think that choosing not to address it,
for people of color, can be an empowered choice.
"I got to get through the day.
I'm not throwing my pearls, so I'm going to let it go.
And that's actually a choice I'm making,
and it's an empowered choice."
Another strategy can be to elicit
one of those white progressives who says they are an ally
and then say, "Then step up and"...
Not to take care of you, but there are times
when that's a really good strategy, is...
So much of my training came from women of color saying,
"You go talk to that person
that's giving us a hard time in the training."
They're going to hear it from you better,
and I'm from Seattle.
I'm as conflict-avoidant as the rest of us who are white,
but that really built up my stamina, right?
So just really quickly, those are some strategies.
And because I know it's late and because the time,
I'm going to close, so just thank you, guys, all.
Our work will never be finished, okay?