I’m very open to the idea that I’ve seen something that wasn’t there and or wasn’t intended 😄, let me see if I can spesifically find what made me feel that way.
Okay, so I have that reaction to paragraphs like this:
White fragility is a sort of defensiveness that takes the form of a variety of strategies that white people deploy when we are confronted with how we participate in and perpetuate racismS. Whites use these strategies to deflect or avoid such a confrontation and to defend a comfortable, privileged vantage point from which race is “not an issue” (at least to us who benefit from it).
and
So if a white person should not pretend to be racially blank, and yet as DiAngelo reminds us “white identity is inherently racist,” what is a white person to do? DiAngelo’s way to thread the needle is this: “I strive to be ‘less white.’ ”
What I hear when I read this is “you are inherentlywhite, and to be white is inheriently bad” thought it’s possible I’m pattern matching this to ideas of being and judgement that I grew up with in Church i.e “you are inherently a sinner”. Do you think this reading is totally unmerited?
And those first two points I’m on board with, but it’s the flavour of the third point that I react to because if I gave someone a bundle of ideas that I reasonably expected to be painful to process I’d try to deliver that message with as much overt kindness and recognition of their pain as I could.
And I’d expect flat statements like “try to drop your defensiveness” or “don’t take it so personally” to just make it harder to process and cause pain I guess 😅. Expecially when the receipients are disposed to think you already don’t like them.
I’m very open to the idea that I’ve seen something that wasn’t there and or wasn’t intended 😄, let me see if I can spesifically find what made me feel that way.
Okay, so I have that reaction to paragraphs like this:
and
What I hear when I read this is “you are inherently white, and to be white is inheriently bad” thought it’s possible I’m pattern matching this to ideas of being and judgement that I grew up with in Church i.e “you are inherently a sinner”. Do you think this reading is totally unmerited?
And those first two points I’m on board with, but it’s the flavour of the third point that I react to because if I gave someone a bundle of ideas that I reasonably expected to be painful to process I’d try to deliver that message with as much overt kindness and recognition of their pain as I could.
And I’d expect flat statements like “try to drop your defensiveness” or “don’t take it so personally” to just make it harder to process and cause pain I guess 😅. Expecially when the receipients are disposed to think you already don’t like them.