Hey, y’all. I want to talk for a minute about why white rage is a more helpful concept for us to grapple with as we are trying to work through and engage with structures of oppression, then white fragility. So let me explain.
Hi, so I’m Dr Nicole Trustel and anthropologist committed to a laboratory humanity with a background and specialty in understanding the connection and relationship between race, racism, the state via citizenship and institutions. So a lot of the work that I have used to do in diversity, equity, inclusion required me to, and my colleagues to bring into a space, quite frankly, complex understandings of structural inequity in a more digestible way.
Now many times when I walked into those spaces, I was wet, met wet. I was met with nothing but anger, resistance, or people trying to prove that they were a good white person. He’s mostly white folks.
When we brought up ideas of structural oppression, and this is why over the years, I realize, and again I had to grapple with the concepts of white rage and white fragility cuz also the kind of biggest ideas at the time, especially after Trump selection and then after, again, the George Floyd murder in 2020.
Now, the problem is white fragility lets people off the hook. It gives people an out to say, well, no, I just feel a kind of way, and so let me grapple with that feeling so that I can then engage in the work.
Now, whether Deangelo is of spousing it or not, that’s really how it’s being interpreted. But the problem is when you bring a structural analysis into a space that cannot hold truth. Because that structural analysis saying that racism is the foundation of this nation, cuz it is. There’s no conversation about. That’s a structural analysis of understanding of, of, of us, of a society. But that’s a truthful analysis that occupies a space that does not know how to hold that truth. So what does it do? It reacts and reacts childishly because instead of understand, this is a structural analysis that is helping us understand our individual experiences because we don’t understand structure. People in that room who then occupy that position of oppression then internalize it as their own personal thing that they’ve done to somebody. This is where we get white fragility. But it’s not fragility, it’s rage. Because how dare you try to accuse them of doing something, but you’re actually not accusing them. You’re talking about and accusing the structure. But when you have aligned yourself to the structure, because we live in a racial capitalist society, you don’t remove the two. So we’re having con different conversations is what I am saying. When we enter into these rooms structure, an individual have to have a conversation together. But right now they’re doing this.