White Fragility: Why It Is So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism

White Fragility: Why it is so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Critical race scholar Zeus Leonardo critiques the concept of white privilege as something white people receive unwittingly. He says that this concept is analogous to suggesting that a person could walk through life with other people stuffing money into his or her pockets without any awareness or consent on the walker’s part. Leonardo challenges this conceptualization, which positions white privilege as innocence, by arguing that “for white racial hegemony to saturate everyday life, it has to be secured by a process of domination, or those acts, decisions, and policies that white subjects perpetrate on people of color.”

Zeus Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy: Beyond the Discourse of ‘White Privilege,’” Educational Philosophy and Theory 36, no. 2 (2004): 137–52, published online January 9, 2013.

A lack of access to elite sports, and issues with racism, are some of the hurdles facing Indigenous athletes when they chase their Olympic dreams. Previous Olympians are working to help remove those barriers. Correction: The locator at 0:04 in this story should read Siksika First Nation, Alberta.

Real talk time.

Colonialism still exists. The effects of original colonization still exist.

Native Hawaiians cannot afford to live on our own land. Everyday tourism kills us.

We are fined for using our water. We are screamed at by tourists. We are stacked in concrete apartments the size of shoe boxes. Waiting lists for apartments are decades long. The government never provides aid. The money that belongs to us is wasted on half finished monorails and hotels. Tourist take pictures of us like we’re an attraction.

In 2018, the UN acknowledged the present day occupation of Hawai’i. And they did nothing.

“The Living Wage Calculator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says that one adult in Honolulu needs to make $16.59 per hour for a living wage. If that is a couple with 2 children, each adult needs to make $17.70 per hour.”

-RealHawaii.Co

My culture, my people, are sexualized, ignored and stepped on.

We cannot live. And everyday more of us die.

And no one even notices. So notice. Notice. Notice.

Say it with me:

Black neighborhoods are not bad neighborhoods.