Potential Space
by Lorrie Goldin, LCSW
WHITE FRAGILITY
When I was an intern in the 1980s, my training cohort was almost exclusively white, as were most of our supervisors. This lack of diversity occasionally emerged as a hot topic. Like a lot of white people back then, I favored diversity in the abstract but didn't really see what it had to do with me.
I was thus the target audience for The Psychotherapy Institute's Fall 2017 Symposium, "Understanding white fragility and its impact on clinical work in a multicultural society". Indeed, keynote speaker Dr. Robin DiAngelo, a renowned white educator, consultant, and writer on issues of racial justice, noted with a pointed wit that white progressives are her specialty.
DiAngelo discussed the systemic racism of our unequal and hierarchical society. Since white people are all beneficiaries of this system, they consciously and unconsciously seek to maintain it.
She defines white fragility as an inability by white people to tolerate racial stress, which is triggered when their positions, perspectives, or advantages are challenged. Examples include defensiveness, denial, anger, retaliation, tears, guilt, and collusive silence. These serve to block the challenge and regain white racial equilibrium. White fragility is a refusal to know and see in order to keep moral trauma at bay, thus relieving white people from facing their complicity in it.
She recommends action as an antidote to guilt and shame, and stresses the necessity of discomfort to build stamina and resilience in the face of race-related shame.
DiAngelo was joined by a panel of distinguished clinicians. Dr. Zonya Johnson and Mr. Lyman Hollins, both African Americans, focused on the impact of white fragility on people of color, emphasizing the clinical encounter and the imperative for white therapists to learn and engage deeply with issues of race and privilege. Dr. Beverly Burch, who is white, drew an analogy to male fragility encountered by second-wave feminists, and spoke of the dissociation and projection employed by whites.
The symposium embodied key points. DiAngelo was fiery, funny, and forceful in holding up a mirror to provoke discomfort and necessary internal examination. Could the predominantly white audience have received what she had to say if either of the black panelists, who were more cautious and measured, said them in exactly the same way? The day brought home not only the importance of white allies in prodding all whites to take up the work and accountability too long avoided. It also underscored the energy people of color must expend in accommodating themselves to the tyranny of white fragility.
I am grateful for such a stimulating symposium to help me further progress along the path from somnolence to woke.