Ken Berwitz
As I write my first column, I am thinking a lot aboutspeech. I am thinking about how an urgent and overdue conversation aboutracism-on our campus and across our country-has been derailed by a diversionary and duplicitous obsession withthe First Amendment. I am thinking about how quicklythe conversation has shifted from white supremacy to white fragility-and howthis shift is itself an expression of white supremacy.
White fragility refersto a range of defensive behaviors through which white people (or moreaccurately, people who believethey are white) deflect conversations about race and racism in orderto protect themselves from race-based stress. Because white people tend to livein environments where whiteness is both dominant and invisible, they growaccustomed to racial comfort, as a result of which even a small amount ofracial stress becomes intolerable. This helps explain why talking about whitesupremacy can feel more painful to white people than white supremacy itself,why the ostensible “stifling” of debate can feel more pressing thanthe literal strangulation of Eric Garner and how”free speech” seems more important than Black lives.
Needless to say, it requiresan astounding degree of narcissism, ignorance and- yes-fragility to scanheadlines detailing the daily, state-sanctioned slaughter of people of colorand somehow conclude that speech is the real problem. White fragility weighsthe minimal discomfort of being confronted with painful realities about raceand racism against the literal death of Black and brown bodies and decides thatthe latter matter less than white discomfort. Which is how we end up here,talking about speech on campus and reading a dozen iterations of the sameeditorial in which students describe-with utterly unintentional irony-how beingcalled out by anti-racist activists makes them feel upset and hurts theirfeelings.
-If you are White – or at any rate think you are White – you are a racist, you are a White supremacist your Whiteness makes you fragile, you are astoundingly narcissistic, you care more about your comfort than the state-sanctioned slaughter of Black people and you\’re too hung up on free speech – free speech being less important than any of the deficiencies just noted.
Bennett Carpenter is a doctoral student in literatureat Duke University. His research interests include Marxism, aestheticphilosophy, comparative modernism(s), and German and British romanticism.
