Stop Protecting White Fragility

It’s what got us here in the first place

Fatima Sultan
An Injustice!
Published in
5 min readJul 2, 2020

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Photo by Viktoria Goda from Pexels.

You’re a racist.

You can stop reading now if you feel so enraged, offended and disgusted. But if you want to know how I know you feel that way, read on.

You’re probably wondering how you can be a racist. You have black friends — a black best friend actually. You had a relationship with a black person once — a long time ago, but that still counts, right?

You read black authors. You pride yourself that you read and watched Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman.

You marched for Black Lives Matter — you have the placards to show for it. You’ve even got a sunny field selfie captioned #blm on Instagram.

You are so much better than your slave-owning ancestors. How can you be a racist?

“I am NOT a racist,” you reaffirm. “Don’t associate me with the likes of them.”

Well, that’s exactly what makes you a racist, buttercup.

In 2011, Robin DiAngelo coined the term ‘white fragility’.

She wrote that white people react to “racial stress,” with an “outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviours such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”

DiAngelo theorized that this reaction served to “reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

We all know a white person who feels particularly fragile in their whiteness right now.

Maybe they spit racist remarks at the pub. They tweet hatred and spread disgust.

Their Facebook supports Neo-Nazism and they understand the English Defence League’s very own scumbag: Tommy Robinson.

The only way we can break down white fragility is if we have open conversations about race. White people must stop being so defensive.

We know you don’t own any slaves. We don’t blame you for your ancestors’ ignorance.

But we must not protect your fragility. It is your fragility that will make a change.

The fear of blackness

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Passionate about life and its many disappointments. This was supposed to be cool. Oops! Hear more from me: https://fatimasultan.substack.com.