White Fragility, Foreword and Introduction

Michael Eric Dyson, the author of the Foreword in White Fragility, makes a claim that racism has been an issue for black society since America’s beginnings. When the land of America was colonized, slaves were brought over and have been the inferior race since then. Dyson also claims that it goes for other races as well, not just blacks; if you are not white, your race is inferior to whiteness. No matter how much the other races fight to be seen equal in the eyes of white society, whites will never see eye to eye with them. This can be seen when Dyson writes, “whiteness is the unchanging variable… whiteness… in its purest form, in its greatest fantasy, never ends” (Diangelo ix). 

Dyson also claims that when white people are caught for committing a crime, you can technically say they have a greater advantage for committing the crime than any other race. He states, “It is a category of identity that is most useful when its very existence is denied. That’s its twisted genius” (ix). I can truly understand what Dyson is trying to prove here because I notice these things on social media. Some days I would just scroll on Twitter and see a post comparing two people, one white and one black male, being punished for their crimes. The white person was arrested for a severe crime, say murder, and the black person was arrested for a less severe crime, say arson. The white person in this situation has committed the greater crime, right? But who gets the greater punishment? The black male. The black male gets the worse punishment. The white male gets off on bail, while the black male must do twenty years. Why? The answer is so simple, yet so hard to understand. This is how our society is built and how unjust our government is, and that is based on the color of a person’s skin. 

There is a movie called American Skin that was released in 2019 that really portrays how black people are treated and how easily they are racially profiled by white cops. The movie gave me another perspective that showed me why a white officer reacts and feels a certain way when it comes to the black culture, and although a lot of cops do not just act upon skin tones, there are those who will go out of their way to punish black people even in situations where they are not doing anything wrong. Reality is, although that was just a movie, the situation has happened many times in real life. Think of the Breonna Taylor situation. She was wrongfully and fatally shot to death by police officers, and it turns out, she was not the suspect the police were after. In September 2020, months after her death in March, the court decided that no police officer would be charged for her murder. The officers involved in the shooting were all white. So yes, it is very true what Dyson says about white culture. They get the benefit of the doubt, but if a black person was in that same situation, well… you already know the outcome. In this wretched world we live in, the white person is always going to get off the hook more easily than the black person. The white person is going to be treated better than the black person. The white person is more likely to get the job than the black person. The white person has a better chance of living than the black person. The color of skin really has that effect on people’s lives. Robin Diangelo, the author of White Fragility, states it perfectly in one sentence, that “race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives” (5). In this day and age, the life of a black person centers around survival, not living.

The officers involved in Breonna Taylor's murder.