Breaking From White Solidarity

Several times in the last week alone I have had encounters with white women who identify as liberal who have gotten upset when I address someone in the group about the casually racist or sexist thing they said. In one instance, I gave a very gentle mention to the person who said the casually racist statement. Because we are adults and we should be able to speak plainly about these things, we moved on. Everything seemed fine. As the night went on, a casually sexist thing was said, and then another casually racist thing was said. I interrupted both times with the intention to engage in conversation about it.

By the end of the night, one of the women got so upset with me to the point of tears. She said, “I feel like I need to protect my friends because I’m the host and I want to have a nice girls night, and I want everyone to be comfortable.” I pointed out that this was white fragility in action. White supremacy doesn’t serve any of us. It makes us uncomfortable, and clearly, incapable of having conversations about racism and sexism. Our comfort comes at the cost of perpetuating racist thoughts and behaviors. This woman wanted me to remain in white solidarity. She didn’t want me to break from white apathy. She wanted me to scroll past the racist thing, let it wash over, maintain the white peace.

In an interview about her book, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo talks about the idea of white solidarity and why it’s so difficult for us to break the silence:

“So, to the degree that our identities are very attached to this idea of being free of racism, we’re actually going to resist any of the critical examination that we need to be engaged in for our entire lives. Because every moment that I push against the socialization that I’ve received into a white supremacist culture, that culture is pushing right back at me. And that pressure is seductive. It’s comfortable. There are social rewards for not challenging racism. [White] people perceive you as easier to get along with when you maintain white solidarity.”

We can’t keep acting like claiming that we are liberal is enough. Being liberal is not the “lesser of two evils” — it is an evil. Liberalism sits in complicity and silence. This is a quiet kind of violence, one that enables the violence of white nationalists and the alt-right — the violence we like to…