Dear white reader: how often do us white people have to be aware of our whiteness in day-to-day interactions? Of course the answer to that question will depend on our own particular social surroundings, but I bet that the vast majority of us out there don’t have to take our race into consideration all that much as we go about normal life.
By now I hope we’re all aware that such racial ease is not the experience for many non-white Americans. Why do white folk so often get to feel like their race is a non-issue when for so many others, race is an inescapable issue?
Robin Diangelo investigates this question in her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Her answer is that being white is a socially constructed racial identity that carries with it the privilege of being considered racially normal. It’s the identity of not having to have an identity; being white is the contrast to all other racial identities. As such, whiteness is integral to racism—“racism” not in the sense of discrete expressions of racial antipathy but in the sense of an “-ism”: an organizing principle of society, like capitalism or individualism. Racism organizes American society just as powerfully as these other -ism’s do.
Yet, as Diangelo points out, white people’s typical way of thinking about racism is not social, it is individual. “Racism” usually means the hostile attitudes of particular persons. That was how I used the word in that post I wrote about old relatives. (I wish I had read this book before I wrote that post!). But such usage, Diangelo argues, does our country a disservice: “racist” has become an adjective almost synonymous with “bad,” and so many well-meaning white folk are terrified at the notion of being labeled a racist. In their terror, many white people can’t handle any kind of discussion that comes close to identifying ways in which their own behavior participates in the larger social system of racism. White people escape from or destroy these discussions by shutting them down with shouty anger or sullen silence, derailing them with tears, or by stepping above them altogether by claiming to be racially “in the know” already.
Diangelo outlines no pat solutions for the ills of American society, but she does offer a way forward: the burden is on white people to examine their assumptions and to grow in ways of true (not showy) humility.
So now let’s bring this whole post around to its title: white, American Christians can benefit from reading White Fragility because doing so can increase their proficiency in the ways of humility, kindness, and love. That’s what we’re all about as Jesus Followers, right?
Here’s the deal. It can be scary to have someone say to you “examine yourself because you’re part of the problem.” No one wants to hear that. For many people, hearing that feels threatening to their very core sense of self.
But it shouldn’t feel as threatening to us Christians. We know that we’re in this sinful world and that our roots are tragically entangled with the roots of sin (I’m thinking of the Parable of the Weeds in the Wheat, Matthew 13:24-30). We also know that Jesus’s death is the atoning sacrifice for “the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). We should be okay with examining ourselves critically because we know that our imperfection does not impede God’s love for us.
And as Christians we should also be okay with laying aside worldly identities and allegiances. As John wrote, Christ gave us “power to become children of God.” That status—God’s Child—should be our foundation and standing on it we can decrease in our own hearts the importance of being white or American.
I was talking to someone about White Fragility recently. She asked me if I thought I would be white in heaven. As someone who has faith in the bodily resurrection of the dead, I anticipate that in the next age my immortal flesh will have the pale skin color that I have now. But that won’t mean that I’ll be “white.” Being “white” in the age I live in now carries with it a privilege that others who aren’t “white” simply don’t have. Being “white” is a crucial cog in the overall mechanism of this world’s injustice. So no, I won’t be “white” in the New Jerusalem. My body will bear the phenotype that my European ancestors gave me, sure, but that “white” thing? It’s a this world thing. Christians, who look ahead to the next world that Christ will bring at his return, should be willing to hold on loosely to the “white” thing. White Fragility can give us some pointers as to how.