But there were also surprising moments of significance, rare as they were.
For example, there was a stop during this trip that made it all at least manageable (if not valuable) for me: when we went to see the site where a boy named José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was murdered by a border patrol agent.
In 2012, a fifteen-year-old-boy named José Antonio Elena Rodríguez was shot and killed by a border patrol officer because he was throwing rocks from his side of the border in Nogales, Mexico. A US border patrol agent named Lonnie Swartz shot this boy with his US-government-issued gun. Swartz fired twelve shots, ten of which hit the boy in the back. Swartz was later acquitted.
In the group that traveled to Arizona and Mexico, there were a considerable number of Black students and one other Latina. And hearing this story, seeing the bullet holes on the side of the building, it all hit the Black and Brown students a little differently than the white students. This was in 2014, when the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining ground and conversations around police brutality were starting to penetrate our academic bubble.
And while we held a vigil and stood in silence around this place, one of the Black students nudged me and said, “Let’s take a solidarity picture, for us.”
I, of course, was happy to have this moment of deep acknowledgment of our shared grief over state-sanctioned murders within our communities. So, together, we both went and tapped the shoulders of the Black students and the other Latina, and we moved a bit away from the group to take this picture, fists in the air. These were the same students who stood up to injustices within our program, the same students who were marching at BLM rallies, the same students who knew how to show up for our communities back home. And standing together during this trip felt poignant for all those reasons.
We were making a statement to white supremacy: You will not destroy us. You will not win. We were holding our pain and finding a way to exist, despite the suffocating whiteness. These rare moments eased the knot in my stomach that I held during this entire trauma-porn-filled trip.
Needless to say, even just one moment of solidarity could not be protected from the imposition of the white gaze. Just before the picture was taken, a white student stepped into the frame. The Black students and students of color looked at one another in confusion. Even then, we had to work to manage and accommodate a white person’s impositions. A few of us shrugged.
I was not going to waste energy making a situation out of this white student’s blithely ignorant act. She seemed to be unaware that not one white person was standing with us, a detail that all the other white students did not miss. And she seemed unaware that this was not a typical, smiling, tourist group photograph. So, I did the next best thing to maintain the integrity of what we were all feeling. I cropped her out of the picture. I needed to both respect the effort that was made by the Black students and students of color and avoid a confrontation with a “well-meaning” white person. Any intervention was going to end poorly. I realize now that white fragility means that it is not just that white people’s feelings must constantly be considered (when our feelings never are). In order to avoid a white person’s meltdown and cries of victimization, the only solution is to accommodate their entitlement to always be centered.
Of course, because white fragility permeates the white experience, this student got wind of what happened and became irate. She saw herself excluded and asked to speak with me, as if she wasn’t the person who had created the uncomfortable situation in the first place. A moment existed that was not meant for her, and how could something not center her?
I patiently explained to her the situation, and in so many words she told me that I was being homophobic—this white student was also queer. And because she was queer, she felt that her whiteness was invisible, or should have been. She leaned into her queerness and said nothing of her whiteness. I did not continue the conversation with her, because talking to white people about entitlement and how much space they take up is hard, but talking to a queer white person is harder. She thought her whiteness was canceled out by her queerness. Somehow she couldn’t be an oppressor, because queer people were oppressed.
On that day, I just nodded and kept moving forward, because no matter what would happen next, I knew she could not see past her own feelings of being excluded. What she had done was invasive, but that did not matter to her. She then sought out solidarity with the other white students for her white pain.
When I talk about white fragility, I am talking about those moments when you encounter a white person who is incapable of having any perspective about their whiteness. They decide not to see how whiteness has harmed and killed so many of us. White fragility requires them to have a certain level of willful ignorance about white supremacy and their participation in it. White fragility means that someway and somehow you, the BIPOC, have become the aggressor and the insensitive one, regardless of the situation and the history of racism in this country. If they are white, they must be right—and who cares where BIPOC stand in that equation?
White fragility has stolen moments from me. How dare I step out from the margins and respect my own humanity? White fragility requires that we stay out of sight. Whiteness always centers itself.
Within academia, white fragility exists in every comment, every group discussion, every social hour. It is precisely the reason that students of color flock to one another and create spaces where we are safe and do not have to walk on the eggshells of whiteness. And in some ways, those spaces that we create become sacred.
I remember the first time I dealt with white fragility without the safety of my posse of radical BIWOC. These women all had a reservoir of self-preservation skills to deal with those moments of dissonance that occur in mixed company. But I was on a different trip, and didn’t have their presence to protect me.
In 2016, I was dating a white man who understood my politics and the ways that I moved through the world. We were moving fast romantically and enjoying getting to know one another. Every year, his family goes to Fort Myers, Florida, to spend a week at the beach and relax. He invited me on this family vacation too soon in our relationship. But I attempted to go into that environment as open and friendly as I could be. By that point, I had grown accustomed to being in rooms where no one else looks like me, dresses like me, talks like me, laughs like me, thinks like me, dreams like me—so this all felt like a new normal I had come to accept while at my PWI.
We were relegated to the same condo as his older brother and his family, which included his wife and their one-year-old. Everything seemed fine. Even in one of the whitest parts of Florida. I just tried to focus on the significance of meeting my boyfriend’s family.
During this trip, I was informed about a family tradition where each couple took turns cooking meals for the extended group, and each couple claimed an evening to host. I volunteered to make appetizers to show my gratitude at being invited on this trip. I was showing up with the goodwill I rarely bring to white spaces, but I had wrongfully assumed that my white boyfriend, and now husband, is who he is because of his upbringing, and not despite it.
While I was preparing a Pinterest-inspired recipe, my boyfriend’s brother came into the kitchen and told me he could not wait to taste my food, because “all Mexican women love to cook.” I was shocked, and told him immediately that I was not Mexican and was not making a Mexican dish. He shrugged it off, because to him saying racially insensitive things to a person like me was normalized, because he “did not mean it like that,” or because he has been told that racism is only racist when you’re wearing a white Ku Klux Klan hood. I would later learn that one of his best friends is Mexican, and that he “lovingly” calls him coconut—white on the inside, Brown on the outside. Through this friend, he had been granted permission to be racist, and he thought that permission applied across the board.
But in that moment, I did not know all the layers of their racism just yet, so I made the decision to also generously shrug that exchange off as a possib
le slip of the tongue.
Later that week, all the relatives congregated in one unit together, and we drank and hung out. As this was happening, I kept quiet and just listened. I have this survival instinct to make myself small when I feel unsafe. By this point, so as to avoid any confrontations or comments like the one I had received from the brother earlier, I had decided to lay low. I also knew myself, and I knew that if pushed far enough, I would react, and I knew they wouldn’t handle it well. White fragility means tiptoeing around white people, a self-policing. So my silence was really to protect them, because consequences to racism is something unheard of for white people who think they are not racist.
Then, one relative was talking to her boyfriend through FaceTime, and she held up her phone to show him the room. She laughed loudly. Turns out, when her boyfriend saw me, he had asked her to inquire if I knew of any good lawn-mowing companies in Chicago. Yes, you read that correctly. I have never lived in Chicago. I had never lived in a home with a lawn that has needed mowing. Apparently, as a Latinx, I was assumed to know lawn-mowing companies across the country. I was the nonwhite person in the room, and their version of a joke.
When she said that, my boyfriend froze. I learned he wasn’t going to stand up to his family in the moment. So, I knew that the next time, I would have to defend myself, because if I was going to continue this relationship, I needed to ensure that they knew that I was not someone they could fuck with. I wouldn’t be a joke just because racism was funny to them.
I waited for the next comment. The thing about tolerating racism is that when I am done tolerating racism, any small infraction will carry all the other instances when I resented my own silence and complicity.
I do not quite remember what his brother said next, but it was racist and it was vile and I told him in the calmest tone I could muster that if his employer found out that he was casually racist there was a good chance that he could lose his job. I told him I would have no problem becoming the person who carefully recorded his antagonistic behavior and dutifully informed his employer myself. Then, I got up from the couch and walked out.
I did not cry, I did not stutter when I spoke to him, and I did not curse. I just defended my humanity to people who seemed unable to see humanity in me. I did this, knowing fully the futility of it.
What happened over the next few days is where white fragility thrives. When white people get called racist because they are being racist, they figure out a way to shift the blame. This is peak white fragility, to be so fragile that they forget the actual harm they caused and focus on their own hurt feelings. No attention is paid to address my pain or heal the relationship. White fragility means that someway and somehow you, the BIPOC, are the aggressor and the insensitive one.
The next day, the wife of the brother told me, with a straight face, that I was in the wrong because I could not take a joke. To her, the whole exchange consisted of me being unfunny. Today, the relative who reported the lawn-mowing statement still thinks I am a bitch; she said that I took things “too far.” She found a slew of other coded ways to police my behavior, to focus on how I spoke and her dissatisfaction with my tone, and not what caused my reaction. Because, to them, their humanity trumps mine, always. This relative and I do not even exchange glances at this point, because I will not tolerate her behavior. In fact, she has insisted that I am still the aggressor in my silence and has cried to my now husband more than once about her victimization. She has used her tears to further cement my evil intentions, and I have not taken the bait. Somehow, white fragility requires that BIPOC comfort their oppressors.
The brother apologized profusely, and we were able to have a discussion where I felt respected and heard. But those relationships got off to a horrible start, and I have put in minimal effort to repair any of them because I was not at fault. And until they accept that they are racist, I will not put myself in a vulnerable position again. Furthermore, being a person who is not white means that I am tasked with doing the work of making white people see my humanity, and that work is emotionally taxing. It is emotionally taxing to keep my own feelings controlled while white people react and do not think before they speak. We are left to pick the pieces of our humanity up off the floor, all while smiling and graciously bowing out, being the “bigger person.” When in reality, I want to scream and cry and fight because that is what their words incite.
Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of anguish at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a whole world out there that takes for granted our lack of humanness, that hates our very existence, outside of its service. And I say “symphony” rather than “cacophony” because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.
—Audre Lorde
So, I decided to not put in labor for these white people, because there was no way in hell I was going to be the “bigger person” for privileged, highly educated white people who should know better. But these white people could not fathom that anything they did or said could be racist, and because they refuse to see the damage, they have done nothing to repair it.
After this vacation, my then-boyfriend and I had a series of very intense conversations, where I questioned his ability to date someone outside his race, and I questioned my own ability to date someone white, considering the circumstance we were in. We had to devise plans for how to react the next time, and there have been plenty of reoccurrences to put those skills into practice. We had to agree on what my role is in those situations and what his role is, because doing nothing and letting me fight the dogs is not my version of a mutually beneficial relationship. And we have come a long way, but that does not mean that white fragility is not impacting us on a regular basis. We had returned to this beach vacation annually since then, and it was a stressful situation every time, for both of us. In 2020, we finally decided to not go back unless his family took serious measures to mend the relationship, a pre–COVID-19 decision. And while the impact of our absence is lost during social-distancing times, we intend on making that statement again and again and again in years to come.
If none of those stories feel familiar or clear, let me tell you about white fragility today by starting with progressive Democrat Amy Cooper. Amy Cooper instantly became a household name for all the wrong reasons. I heard about Amy Cooper from almost the first moment the Central Park video went viral. I stay online pretty consistently to track and monitor these occurrences for my own work on Latina Rebels. I did not actually watch the full video until later that evening, but even from the screenshots and comments early on, I knew exactly what was happening.
A white woman was politely being told that what she was doing was objectively wrong. She had her dog off leash in an area of Central Park where dog owners are mandated to keep their dogs on a leash. Nothing wrong was done in telling her to follow a basic rule.
The person who told Amy Cooper to leash her dog happened to be a Black man named Christian Cooper. To her, his race in and of itself was an escalation; white people view themselves as morally superior to BIPOC, and now here was a Black person who did not know his place. White people will always reject the label of racist, because calling them racist means calling them a bad person, and no white person believes themselves to be a bad person. They’ve always been taught that white is right, and darkness is deviance. She was innocent, by virtue of her whiteness, and he was somehow criminal and aggressive, because of his Blackness.
Amy Cooper responded to this request by attempting to frame Christian Cooper. In the video, Amy Cooper calls the police and lies; she tells them that a Black man is threatening her. She knew the police would believe and protect her. She hoped the police would frighten and arrest him. Whether intentionally or not, Amy Cooper understood that because she is white and a woman, she could weaponize her whiteness and her gender to endanger a Black man.
In this video, Amy Cooper first warns Christian Cooper that she is going to get him, in so
many words. She says she is going to call the cops, and then we see her get on the phone with the police. She tells someone on the phone that she needs help because an “African American man was recording [her] and threatening [her and her] dog.” In the video, we see her screaming and agitated on that call, and what seems like tears or a quivering voice in response to her imaged threat.
BIPOC have been conditioned to expect vitriol when confronting white people, and Christian Cooper took out his phone and began to record their exchange to protect himself. A normal interaction would have resulted in one person telling another that they are doing something wrong, and that person would have adjusted their behavior. But we are not talking about normal interactions when we live in a white supremacist society. In a white supremacist society, white people are unaccustomed to being talked to prescriptively by Black people. White people will react violently so as to make the argument that they are not bad people, while simultaneously embracing racist tropes to “win.”
This defensiveness is rooted in the false but widespread belief that racial discrimination can only be intentional.
—Robin DiAngelo
As a woman, I have a response to women in distress. But as a woman of color, I know this woman was not in any danger. When you have positioned yourselves as the purveyors of goodness and benevolence, being told you are not being those aforementioned things feels like an attack. In a society that coddles white fragility, the result is Amy Cooper.
This act of documentation has been a relatively new phenomenon as a way to prove what BIPOC have long been saying: white people will be racist to maintain the racial status quo and then deny their racism in the same breath to maintain their moral superiority. That is white fragility. If that story had been told by Christian Cooper without video evidence, white people would not have believed it. White people would have questioned what else he did, and they would have probed and left that anecdote thinking something was left out, because to them the story makes zero sense. No one would have believed that this white woman would have lied. Because white people are good, and everyone else is bad. Without this video evidence, Christian Cooper might have even begun to doubt what he experienced.
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts Page 19