Beyond White Fragility: Reflections on Race and Anti-Racism
Only a few months after I moved to Minneapolis in 2006, I was warned about 38th and Chicago. On my first day at work, upon learning that I had taken the bus and gotten off across from Cup Foods, my new boss—a white woman—said something that I’ve never forgotten: “Be really careful about 38th and Chicago. It’s a bad area, a bad intersection. Someone was shot there recently.” She gave me, another white woman, a knowing look. The volume of her voice had lowered, like she was confiding something in me, like her warning required a hushed tone.
Fourteen years later, a white police officer murdered George Floyd at that “bad intersection.” Derek Chauvin ground his knee into Floyd’s neck for seven minutes and 46 seconds while three other officers stood by and watched.
In the wake of the June 2020 uprisings in Minneapolis that have expanded globally, I’ve been reflecting on that interaction, that intersection, and the larger structuring forces of whiteness and white supremacy in the United States. Minnesotans are famous for “Minnesota Nice,” which I learned actually meant “Minnesota Ice” to Minnesotans of color. The thinly veiled racism of the phrase “a bad intersection” relied on me to understand the racist coding of the word “bad,” about which there was no confusion. “Bad,” of course, never meant something like how 3M polluted Minnesota’s waterways or the sexual violence committed by fraternity members in Dinkytown, the student-filled neighborhood adjacent to the University of Minnesota. My boss’ warning offers a short-hand encapsulation of the dynamics of race, space, policing, and anti-Blackness that made that intersection dangerous for Floyd.
During the seven years I lived in Minneapolis, the already deeply racially segregated city became even more so. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has so richly detailed in Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, the racialization of U.S. geography intensified in the wake of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968. Instead of upending redlining and racial discrimination, as it was intended to do, the Act ushered in what Taylor terms “predatory inclusion.” The real estate industry began targeting Black would-be homebuyers as repositories ripe for capitalist exploitation through, for instance, predatory loans designed to result in foreclosure. It is likewise no secret that the development of the interstate system in the United States tore up Black neighborhoods. In the Twin Cities, Interstate 94 plows directly through the former Rondo Neighborhood of St. Paul; according to the Minnesota History Center, “one in every eight African Americans in St. Paul lost a home to I-94.”Those who refused to leave were “met by police with sledgehammers.”
The legacies of this compound, of course, into the present, where the Twin Cities boasts of a high-quality of life—for some—while simultaneously perpetuating some of the “largest racial inequities in the U.S.” Given the longstanding production of white life on the backs of denying the same life chances and opportunities to BIPOC, this is unsurprising. Yet this relation, which is invisibilized and actively erased in the service of whiteness, has once again been burst wide open.
The tireless activism of Black Lives Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, Reclaim the Block, Communities United Against Police Brutality, and other Black-led organizations has made this moment of rupture possible, yet there has been the question of why now regarding the nascent politicization of some white people. The very premise of #SayTheirNames underscores the horrifying banality of police killings of Black people—including the murders of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and countless others—that loop endlessly on screens and through social media.
Yet there is a sense that “this time is different,” as New York Times columnist Jenna Wortham writes. Perhaps, as Wortham speculates, the pandemic has meant that it is more difficult for white people to turn away from the daily reality of state-sanctioned anti-Black violence. The New York Times bestseller list evinces this shift, with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism at number one, followed by Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X. Kendi’s germinal works. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s 1997 book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race is now a bestseller too.
As social media has exploded with resources for white people who are—perhaps for the first time—seeking to acknowledge the existence of white supremacy and systemic racism, the term “ally” has once again arisen, alongside examples of “performative allyship.” This is especially pertinent in a moment where corporations like Amazon, known for egregious labor practices reliant on the exploitation of Black and Brown people, are quick to denote their support of Black lives. So too for an attention economy, where critiques of white silence are morphed into hollow demonstrations of wokeness. As so many activists have noted, the very notion of “allyship” reifies distance, akin to the logics of charity versus mutual aid. There’s no skin in the game, so to speak.
In “Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival,” Dean Spade argues that as a form of “radical collective care,” mutual aid offers a “transformative alternative to the demobilizing frameworks for understanding social change and expressing dissent that dominate the popular imagination” (131). What other possibilities exist, particularly in this moment? What might it look like if the non-profit industrial complex and white saviorism were dismantled in favor of mutual aid? As Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other prison abolitionists underscore, abolition is not just about absence or removal; rather, it requires the presence of resources that communities need to thrive in a world beyond prisons and police. In the wake of a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting BIPOC communities and the attendant uprising against these intertwined forms of violence and dispossession, it is crucial to follow the lead of those who have for so long imagined other futures.
Allison Page is Assistant Professor of Communication & Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University