It has often been suggested that if you want to help, you should shut up and listen. In a February interview with The Guardian, for example, Robin DiAngelo said: “The problem with white people…is that they just don't listen. In my experience, day in and day out, most white people are absolutely not receptive to finding out their impact on other people. There is a refusal to know or see, or to listen or hear, or to validate.”
DiAngelo, however, either fails or refuses to recognize a basic rule of intellectual inquiry for anyone who is interested in learning rather than indoctrination: listening is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for understanding. In other words, asking questions, examining disagreements, and carrying on with a healthy skepticism are key parts of rigorous investigation and analysis.
The theory of white fragility asserts (for rarely does it argue) that a white person does not have much to say at all on racism; or rather, what he does say is almost certain to be unhelpful. He is so hopelessly entombed in implicit biases he has been internalizing since birth that his intentions are invariably at odds with the impact that his thoughts and actions have on people of color, primarily because such biases are rooted in the experience of whiteness in America. As a result, he is simply not equipped to see how privilege makes him complicit in the perpetuation of a racist society. Moreover, because he has been “socialized” to have a “white racial frame” that makes the frame invisible to him, he cannot but view society, and calibrate his participation in it, from a perspective of white racial superiority.
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