Provocation, what is provocation? Provocation can take many different forms, either in language or in words, but it is certain that it can have a positive or negative impact on people. White privilege and racism have always been a sensitive topic, and it is contrary to the modern subjective idea that everyone is equal. In the article “Whiteness is a racial construct. It’s time to take it apart” in The Globe and Mail, it clearly stated “”White fragility,” she says, is the inability to cope with conversations about race that don ‘t protect individual white people’s sense of innocence. Western society maintains that racism is an act that individuals do, not a system that all of us exist in. “
This sentence has actually made people feel her provocation and malice against white people. What she meant by this sentence is to imply that whites are synonymous with racists, and whites will not admit that they are nationalists because of their “vulnerability” and cannot bear the topic of race. To be honest, I don’t feel very good about this sentence. Although her words suggest that whites are racists, she did not provide strong evidence to prove that all whites are racists. It is racist remarks. Think about it from another angle. Isn’t the view that white people are racist in this way is actually a view of racism? It’s just that it’s not people of color but white people that discriminate. Although it is undeniable that whiteism is still active in society, such as KKK, a party that pursues white supremacy and discriminates against the ethnic movement of color, it is not possible to automatically think that all apples are bad because of a small number of “bad apples”.
Yes, I think the main purpose of this article is to discuss the racism of some whites and the enjoyment of white privileges while emphasizing that they are not racism, but the feeling this article gives me is racism against whites. Although white privilege and racism prevailed a few decades ago, with the changes of the times and the development of education, such phenomena are slowly disappearing. Although they have not completely disappeared, most of racism has been eliminated. But because of historical issues, many modern people directly associate whites with racists, but whites are also humans, and humans are complicated. There are very kind people and cruel people, like a bucket of apples. There are good apples and bad apples. You cannot directly assume that the whole barrel of apples are bad just because there are bad apples in it, or assume that the whole barrel of apples is good because there are good apples. The provocative behavior of “a few bad apples spoil the barrel” in this article seems to me irrational and unthinking.