Social Justice Usage
Source: DiAngelo, Robin J. White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018, pp. 59–60.
As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.
The past was great for white people (and white men in particular) because their positions went largely unchallenged. In understanding the power of white fragility, we have to notice that the mere questioning of those positions triggered the white fragility that Trump capitalized on. There has been no actual loss of power for the white elite, who have always controlled our institutions and continue to do so by a very wide margin. Of the fifty richest people on earth, twenty-nine are American. Of these twenty-nine, all are white, and all but two are men (Lauren Jobs inherited her husband’s wealth, and Alice Walton her father’s).
Similarly, the white working class has always held the top positions within blue-collar fields (the overseers, labor leaders, and fire and police chiefs). And although globalization and the erosion of workers’ rights has had a profound impact on the white working class, white fragility enabled the white elite to direct the white working class’s resentment toward people of color. The resentment is clearly misdirected, given that the people who control the economy and who have managed to concentrate more wealth into fewer (white) hands than ever before in human history are the white elite.
New Discourses Commentary
In Social Justice, “the good old days” is a racist, sexist, heteronormative/homophobic, cisnormative/transphobic, fatphobic, or ableist coded term for when white, male, straight, cisgender, thin, and able-bodied supremacies were considered the standard and were able to be exercised openly instead of behind a mask. As such, using the phrase is a microaggression against any historically minortized, marginalized, or oppressed group. It is a nostalgia not for a genuinely simpler time but also for one when open bigotry was accepted as the norm. You’ll notice, perhaps, that this understanding of the concept reads an awful lot into it that might not be there (see also critical, critical consciousness, and close reading).
Related Terms
Ableism; Cisgender; Cisnormative; Close reading; Code; Critical; Critical consciousness; Fatphobia; Heteronormative; Homophobia; Marginalized; Mask; Microaggression; Minoritize; Norm; Oppression; Patriarchy; Social Justice; White; White fragility; White supremacy; Woke/Wokeness
Revision date: 1/31/20
3 comments
Robin DiAngelo is a deeply racist woman who gets to express herself by highlighting just how terrible and hopeless the world is for non-whites, how non-white are barely treated as humans in today’s world. The good part is she wants to make the world good again! Despite how superior she is, she still cares about the rest of us. What a saint.
Robin DiAngelo the woman who makes Herbert Marcuse look sane
It’s slightly more complicated. Many mixed-race people were the offspring of male black slaves and female Irish indentured servants. The difference between a slave and an indentured servant was that the enslavement of an indentured servant was temporary, e.g. 10 years. But if an Irish female indentured servant became pregnant from a black slave, the resulting child would be a permanent slave too, owned by the same master. The owner then could blackmail the Irish mother into “voluntarily” lengthen the indentured servitude indefinitely, by threatening to withold the child and treat it horribly if the mother wouldn’t stay. The mother was effectively held hostage by her natural attachment to her child, which was owned by the slave owner. So slave-owners often locked up the irish female indentured servant together with a black slave, and ordered the black slave to impregnate the female.