In response, these landowners (and other powerful white people) came up with a divide-and-conquer strategy. […]
Whether we’re rich or poor, we’re all white, so there is no need for us to fight each other. Instead, we need to band together to fight the villains among us: Black Bodies.
p. 70
“In the late 1600s and early 1700s, these white and Black immigrants worked and lived together on plantations that were owned by powerful white male bodies…in several early worker revolts, Black and white people rose up together against plantation owners. These revolts posed serious threats to the power and supremacy of white landowners.
In response, these landowners (and other powerful white people) came up with a divide-and-conquer strategy. They gave white workers small parcels of land to work…”You’re just like us: you’re white and you have land to work.”…. At the same time, they forbade Blacks from owning land, and told them, “You’re Black, and you’re completely unlike us.”
“What had been white-on-white (or, usually, powerful-white-on-less-powerful white) trauma was transformed, in carefully calculated fashion, into white-on-Black trauma, which was then institutionally enforced… Political leaders in Virginia legislated whiteness… The first such law appears to have been enacted in 1691.”
“Over the years, all of this proved effective in shifting the power [tension] divide from landowners versus workers to white people versus Black people… It undermined poor white folks’ sense of identity and convinced them to fight against their own interests. It created a false settling in the bodies of many poor, white Americans. And it soothed some of the antipathy poor white people felt toward far more powerful and wealthy white landowners. To this day, many white Americans continue to live under the thumb of these delusions.” – Resnaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands. Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. pp. 69-70
The deadliest manifestation of white fragility is its reflexive confusion of fear with danger and comfort with safety.
pp.99
“In some cases, when a white body simply experiences discomfort, its lizard brain may interpret this as a lack of safety and react with violence. Thus white fragility grants permission to white and police bodies to regularly kill Black ones – even unarmed, unresistant ones- in ostensible self-defense (“I feared for my life,” “I thought his wallet was a gun,” and so on).”
“What happens when a police officer’s body interprets the mere presence of a Black body – or the presence of a Black body and an object that could possible a gun – as a high-stress situation? … “By some accounts, Yanez was an exemplary patrolman who had graduated at the top of his class. Until he shot Castile, he had a spotless record…
Yanez, a trained police officer, was terrified of Castile, a calm, compliant young man whom he’d pulled over for a broken taillight. Castile was in a car with an equally compliant young woman and her small child. Castile, politely explained [His words were: “Sir, I have to tell you…] – presumably in an effort to attempt to settle Yanez’s nervous system – that he had a gun, which was legally registered in his name. Yanez then shot him dead.”
“Officer Yanez was charged with second-degree manslaughter.”
“Some questions to consider: if Castile had been white, would Yanez have shot him dead? And another: Can you recall an incident in which a police officer pulled over a white driver who was calm and compliant and had a child in the car- and then shot that driver dead because the officer `thought I was going to die’? And another question: if such a thing were to actually happen, do you think a jury would agree that the officer’s fear justified the killing of the white driver?”
“What if, some time before his encounter with Castile, Officer Yanez had addressed any racialized trauma that was stored and stuck in his body? Or, what if his employer had recognized the need to provide some healing infrastructure to help its officers address this ancient trauma? Might either one have prevented Castile’s death?”
“As we have seen, thinking that `I am going to die’ when encountering a Black body is baked into the bodies – and the lizard brains- of many Americans.”
“Robin DiAngelo describes this reaction well:
White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation... This insulated environment of racial privilege builds white expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress.
These defensive moves include forms of fighting, fleeing, or freezing and, occasionally, verbally annihilating.”