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Sent a risky email out into the world today. Now we wait and see how it all play out. 
I think it’s important to live by the words you teach. If you see something amiss or perpetuating harm-there is an option: speak up. Not everybody can do this so if you ignore a situation being able to help you are a conspirator now to the harm. In a course I felt v uncomfortable
With a reading being chosen, namely White Fragility. No one said anything the first class so I thought that maybe no one cared. But after a day or two it didn’t feel right with my soul and so I ask my peers: is this book more harmful than helpful? And after expressing our concern
We were able to connect more as a class and be honest about the situation we were in. The course is about Race, Class and Gender- I won’t say the professor because I feel like they deserve the opportunity to read and understand our perspective first. So this became our statement
Of concern. For anybody looking to why not White Fragility-read below.
We, as a collective body of students, have discussed the readings assigned this semester and one in particular, White Fragility by Robin Diangelo has raised concerns across our cohort. <redacted for privacy> and I have created this proposal with approval from our class to address
our concerns to you and ask you to reconsider the text for the following reasons.
White Fragility has been a popular read since its publication in 2018, however, the underlying fact is Robin Diangelo, a white woman, has written this book with an expressed intention to explain
White Fragility has been a popular read since its publication in 2018, however, the underlying fact is Robin Diangelo, a white woman, has written this book with an expressed intention to explain
racism to other ‘educated’ liberal white people. The knowledge and expertise on the subject Diangelo claims is from her time and research in academia in multicultural studies. Unfortunately, this is not the whole truth and Diangelo does not credit the voices of Black authors who
have heavily influenced this book. It is also difficult to ignore that Diangelo has profited heavily off this book following the events of police brutality and murder of Black men and woman. More can be read about this here: Forbes, Sales Of ‘White Fragility’—And Other Anti-Racis
Books—Jumped Over 2000% After Protests Began. From this perspective, Diangelo is not acknowledging her role in further perpetuating harm but instead is essentially coaching on how to hide toxic whiteness rather than confront it at face value. The whole idea of “White Fragility”
focuses around implicit bias and that white people don’t realize the harm they are inflicting on Black people. This discourse is problematic, providing excuses for racism carried out by white people who should instead be actively being anti-racist and confronting the harm they
perpetuate. While academic tradition encourages divergent views and critical analysis of claims, narratives, and positionality, if the overarching purpose of this class is to draw on critical, feminist, Whiteness, cultural studies, and intersectionality theories in the analysis
of race, class, gender, and other social categories (including culture, language, and sexuality) as major frameworks that structure inequalities in both schools and the larger society, we feel White Fragility falls short -- particularly in rooting itself in theory and deep
practice of rigorous criticality and structural understanding. We believe that this text is not the perspective that would be warranted for a class that is supposed to dive deep into the intersections of race, class, and gender.
We also wrote what to do instead of White Fragility but that is a lot already for one tweet. The point of this is to fight against things you see as unjust and to show that sometimes good intentions are harmful. I hope if you want to teach #whitefragility you reconsider.
