“White” is a word that makes people uncomfortable, mostly white people, as a white person I can understand that word making people uncomfortable, and in the past year it no longer makes me uncomfortable. The quote itself portraits the idea that if you are “white” you are a racist, which is not fair to people, I am kind person and I try not to harm someone or make them feel bad, but maybe I am not a racist but I am part of a system that was built on racism. I believe and the idea of “white” needs to be separated from racism.
Out of habit most white people feel the need to defend their whiteness, it is nothing that we did it is what our ancestors did and we can’t change it and we shouldn’t justify their horrible actions, white is a colour but it leaves so many people ahead. When we first started discussing white privilege in class I honestly was made me feel uncomfortable to think that maybe I got something in my live because of my colour not because I earned, I felt the need to defend, and I assume other have the same urge. Disrupting this white privilege is a need of our newly developing society, we are in a time of change but everyone has to be open to it and welcome it, and this privilege will be hard for white people to ever let go.
This article helped me understand white fragility, and it does exist in everyday life, I seem to even have these feelings, but it is important for me and others to be able to move past it. The quote is that white fragility is “the inability to cope with conversations about race that don’t protect individual white people’s sense of innocence.” I feel that race makes white people feel guilty when conversations happen and nobody wants to feel guilty, and we try to protect are innocents by neglecting the issues of race. The word white brings up those feeling of guilt and that is why people shy away from the word itself one quote from the article that seems to be the most important is, “The solution to white fragility, she says, is to build up stamina; just as with exercise, that involves doing the painful task over and over again until you get better.”
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