Rejoinder to critics of White Fragility.pdf

THE LION AND THE UNICORN, 2021

Over the last two decades, white supremacist movements have been on the rise in the United States-beginning shortly after the election of President Barack Obama and erupting violently, after the subsequent election of Donald Trump, with the "Unite the Right" rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 (Southern Poverty Law Center). 1 This incident, along with mass shootings by white supremacists occurring in 2019 in Poway, California, and El Paso, Texas, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in 2020 by father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael, has amplified the need for educators and other adults to address race-based hate through conversation with children (Teaching Tolerance). Yet, very few picture books-which often serve as vehicles for engaging young people in critical (race) thinking 2-tackle this troubling truth. Many picture books address race/racism, often through representations of slavery, segregation, exclusion, inequality, and/or related protest, 3 but few picture books directly confront or even acknowledge white supremacy or whiteness. 4 This omission is indicative of Lipsitz's concept of the "possessive investment in whiteness," the idea that White Americans are "encouraged" to "remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity" (vii), as well as the tendency of White people to avoid naming their own racial identities (see, for instance, Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides; DiAngelo; Hancock and Warren; Lea and Sims; Leonardo; Sue, Race Talk). As DiAngelo argues, "white fragility" prevents White people from deconstructing whiteness and the ways it impacts people of color. Though DiAngelo highlights the importance of going beyond discussions of white supremacy, from which "good" White people can distance themselves, in conversations about racism, it is just as important to address

2019

Waste of a white skin: the Carnegie Corporation and the racial logic of white vulnerability, by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015, 328 pp., $ 34.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780520280878* Black knowledge of white social and symbolic formations has always countered black experiences of white racism and violence. Anna Julia Cooper's intuitions on European immigration in the consolidation of the American post-slavery racial order, or W.E.B. Du Bois' analysis of the structural congruence, within that very order, of whiteness and wage labor in reinforcing black subjugation are examples of that vast black archive. Academic repression and censorship drowned those voices at a time when scholars and literati characterized years of ferocious antiblack terror as the "Gilded Age. " Tiffany Willoughby-Herard's Waste of a White Skin starts by reminding that, for Blacks on all shores of the Atlantic, there was nothing "gilded" about that period, not even the limited sense of a fatuous and illusory veneer of optimism and prosperity to disguise the harshness of socioeconomic realities. The book is then, first and foremost, a declaration of love and respect for many generations of Black critical thought in the wake of racial slavery. It follows and reweaves often forcibly truncated critical threads, which speak to a present that is the afterlife of black captivity, marked by the systematic, violent endangering of black lives and claims. What links the heydays of Jim Crow and global settler colonialism with the more recent fin de siècle opening the way to Donald Trump is that in both cases discourses of white misery and uplift have been immensely useful to reset, update, and legitimize antiblackness as the juggernaut that makes America (and the white world) "great. "

This is one of two chapters of a book-length manuscript, In Defense of the Vulnerable: White Fragility, Peace and Conflict Studies, and the Interdisciplinary Production of Knowledge, under revisions for peer review at Palgrave that engage with Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility. This chapter constitutes a rejoinder to her more assiduous critics, with a particular focus on her most prolific critic, Jonathan Church.

Teaching With Tension , 2019

Some semesters we begin with a simple exercise-we ask students to close their eyes and imagine "an American." Then we ask them to write a description of the person they saw in their minds. Afterwards, we ask students to share what they wrote. Someone will raise a hand and begin reading a description of a white man. So will the next volunteer. And the next. After the third or fourth repetition, realization dawns across the class that almost everyone, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, described nearly the same middle-class, white man. This leads to the first of many uncomfortable discussions-Why? Why does "American" mean a white man for so many of us? Why is his whiteness-and maleness and class-privileged? What are the implications and repercussions for the great many people in this country who do not share his race, his gender, his class? Are non-white people (or non-male) people less "American"? This is one of the many discussions we have in our introductory literature courses about race and privilege despite the fact that teaching race and the history of race in America remains a controversial topic. Many educators have faced severe backlash both inside the classroom and from their administrations for attempting to teach critical race theory. i Often, this backlash can be attributed to "white fragility" as articulated by Robin DiAngelo. DiAngelo defines white fragility as "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions

2022

The idea of proposing the summer school ‘Endangered Theories’ stemmed from three concurrences. The first one is still unfolding worldwide, from the United States to Europe and Australia, right and far right supporters’ efforts to restore a conservative social order has resulted in a concerted attack against Critical Race Theory (CRT). By positing what is defacto a niche of critical legal theory as either a harmful pedagogy for white pupils, or a form of anti-white racism, or, at best, a highly divisive ideology, a disparate array of enraged far right and rightwing parents, pundits and politicians, have successfully leveraged the latest salvo against anti-racist social movements, Black Lives Matter in primis. In the USA, no less than twenty-two states have sought to pass legislation banning or limiting the teaching of race and racism in schools and/or universities. In Australia, where the attack against CRT was mounted by the same politician who rallied against the teaching of gender in schools, it renewed the legitimacy of the white hegemonic status quo. In France, it has lent a new rationale for state representatives to oppose the scrutinization of its national history, political values and identity. In Italy, where the far right and radical right politicians have been rallying against migrants and no-border activists for years, it re-asserted the myth that the ‘nation’ is ‘white and ‘in danger.’ The second occurrence took place in Europe, where, both the Black Lives Matter movement and racial inequities that the Covid-19 global pandemic brought in sharp relief led to the launch of the Action Plan Against Racism (APAR) in the spring of 2020. As the chair of The European Network Against Racism (ENAR), Karen Taylor, stated in the wake of its launch, APAR constitutes the very first European normative document that ‘explicitly acknowledges the existence of structural, institutional and historical dimensions of racism in Europe’ as well as the necessity of addressing them by adopting a critical race and intersectional approach. Not incidentally, the attacks against CRT began at the same time as anti-racist organisations put renewed pressure on the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to enforce the recommendations of APAR, including involving racial and ethnic minorities in European policymaking, and redressing European national histories of colonialism, enslavement and genocides. The third occurrence unfolded in Portugal. Following a string of racially motivated crimes that culminated in the murder of Bruno Candé in July 2020, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe, Dunja Mijatović, issued the Memorandum on combating racism and violence against women in Portugal. In this document, Mijatović urged the Portuguese government to ‘acknowledge the legacy of the repressive structures put in place by past colonial policies’ and to identify and correct ‘ingrained racist biases and their present-day ramifications’. Heeding this request, the National Plan Against Racism and Discrimination (NPARD) was launched in 2021 presenting ‘intersectionality’ and deconstruction of ‘stereotypes’ as its guiding principles. Albeit nowhere in the NPARD is clarified how exactly CRT will inform the anti-racist interventions of the state, well-known rightwing pundits have systematically attacked CRTinspired scholarship and activism. Because of these three occurrences, CRT has been in the public eye both as a dangerous political ideology and a suitable tool to redress racism. In the first instance, CRT has operated as an empty 1 signifier, by which far right and rightwingers have conflated affirmative actions with multiculturalism, wokeism, identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture. In the second instance, CRT has worked as an anti-racism tool, by which activists have advanced their demands for social justice. Either way, no comprehensive explanation has been offered about what CRT is, how it distinguishes itself from and/ or relates with other theoretical paradigms concerned with race and racism and, more importantly, if and how it accounts for the various ways in which racialized minorities have been oppressed from country to country in Europe and elsewhere. The summer school ‘Endangered Theories’ addressed these questions through a programme that mixed introductory lectures on relevant theoretical paradigms concerned with the intersections of power relations and social divisions that are structured by race, gender, class, and nationality with lectures that illustrated their application in a variety of national contexts (i.e., the UK, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, USA, and South Africa), roundtables with experts, workshops with participants, and social events. Each day was dedicated to one of the five selected models: CRT; Critical Whiteness Studies; Postcolonial Europe; Afro-Pessimism; and Settler Colonial Studies. Besides reflecting the expertise of the organizers, these paradigms afford prospective participants the opportunity to approach standing debates with new theoretical lenses.Afro-Pessimism and Settler Colonial Studies, for instance, have been rarely deployed to examine the various phases of the Portuguese empire, let alone the formation of its national myths and identities.

Utah State University Press eBooks, 2022

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