On that score they have a point. I seek to fix the warp that racial bigotry can bring; I want to challenge, one brain and body at a time, the poisonous precincts in which some of my white students were bred. I want my students to be uncomfortable with their racial ignorance, with their sworn, or unconscious, innocence. I’m sure that feels warped to many whites.
Teaching at a Catholic school like Georgetown has given me renewed appreciation for “culpable ignorance”—in this case, the idea that white people are responsible for things they claim not to know. Although I’m a man of books and thought, I’m also a man of faith. It is my faith that helps me see how whiteness has become a religion. The idolatry of whiteness and the cloak of innocence that shields it can only be quenched by love, but not merely, or even primarily, a private, personal notion of love, but a public expression of love that holds us all accountable. Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
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As my brave white student discovered, whiteness claims so loudly its innocence because it is guilty, or at least a lot of white folk feel that way. This is why, of course, your resistance to feelings of guilt is absurdly intense. There is a terror in accepting accountability, because it doesn’t end with your recognition that something is rotten in Denver or Detroit. It suggests something is amiss across our country.
That’s a terrifying thought to field, a terrifying responsibility to absorb. It means accepting accountability for your unanimous, collective capacity for terror, for enjoying a way of life that comes at the direct expense of other folk who are denied the privileges you take for granted.
If white guilt is real, so is black guilt, though it is quite different and has its own history. Black bodies that were captured and enslaved reached American shores half dead and soaked in racial guilt. They were guilty of their blackness, guilty of being dangerously different. They were guilty of resisting the loss of their freedom, guilty of their rage at injustice, guilty of trying to escape, guilty of the insubordination of indignation. They were guilty in every way of every crime, and whiteness, in adjudicating that guilt, told itself the very same lie every abusive parent, every batterer, and every spouse killer has told their victim throughout space and time: you made me do it.
And when this innocence is questioned, whiteness rages, or it weeps in disbelief. Conservatives lambast the moral and intellectual inferiority of blacks. Liberals cry at our ingratitude. How dare the historically guilty point a finger at the innocent? No court in the land can change the immutable fact of race, of guilt and innocence by pigment. It might be the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that held that an enslaved man was his master’s property and that blacks are not citizens. It might be the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that cleared the way for the separate but equal policies of Jim Crow. No matter the weight of white transgressions, they are seen as small acts of badness within a bigger body of goodness. “We have bad seeds,” says the innocence narrative, “but those bad seeds only prove how good the plant is. A few of us are guilty, but only a few. The rest of us are innocent.”
You preach responsibility as a personal credo, as a civic tenet, and yet you will have none of it. Your guilt is unbearable to you. But our daily subjugation, our not naming your guilt, is unbearable to us. We are unbearable to each other. And so we are stuck looking across a divide we cannot bridge.
What I ask my white students to do, and what I ask of you, my dear friends, is to try, the best you can, to surrender your innocence, to reject the willful denial of history and to live fully in our complicated present with all of the discomfort it brings.
Many of you find yourselves exhausted by thinking of how such colossal change might be made. You worry that your individual choice to do better won’t be a match for our horrible history of hate. And even when individual black people confront individual white people, even when we love one another, white innocence still clouds our relationships. We are two historical forces meeting, and the velocity of that history is so strong that it can break the bonds of individual love. We are no longer two people asking each other to be understood. Instead, we are two symbols in a 400-year-old battle of guilt and innocence.
This happens to so many of us, so many of you. The white person we love is no longer an individual, but, in their insistence on innocence, they are all of whiteness; they have chosen whiteness over us. This may happen between loving black and white classmates in a college course that probes the history of race. In these encounters abstract ideas often become concrete realities. The beauty of history, its ornate, or ugly, truths, are distant until we are brought face-to-face with their consequences. History takes shape in the person before me. When it is made personal, history becomes urgent. The neat irresolution of history becomes messy, yearning for an answer now.
We are no longer ourselves alone. What was once the collective, institutional notion of whiteness becomes the white person I encounter. And my blackness is no longer isolated and atomistic; it forges destiny with all the blackness that came before me. And in my insistence on holding you accountable for privilege, for tiny but terrifying aggressions, for condescension, for any of the everyday racial slights that reinforce white supremacy, I have invoked again your sense of your guilt. I am not just a person, but a pointing finger, a scold, a challenge to the authority you were given as a birthright and that you cannot bear to relinquish.
If this can occur between classmates, between friends, between lovers, between blood kin, imagine the stakes when it occurs between groups of people. Whiteness becomes a mob of innocence and it responds like a mob to a call for black justice. It responds with riot gear, tear gas, clubs, arrests, Tasers, rubber bullets, and real bullets too. It responds with a collective no. In that moment of mob innocence, it truly believes that if one police officer is indicted, whiteness itself is indicted. If one mass shooter at a black church is brutalized or injured before he can reach a fair trial, then whiteness itself is injured.
White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top of. The fragility of ego versus the forced labor of slavery, the lynchings of Jim Crow, the beatings and the police violence sparked by the endeavors of desegregation. If it weren’t real, if it weren’t in action every single day—and every day seems to bring new stories of an unarmed black person being shot down by the police, new stories of black college kids being called “nigger,” new stories of white anger flashing in bigoted humor about the first black president—it would be a perverse joke.
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