White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

ACTIVITY: Locating White Fragility in Citizen

For many Black Americans, the concepts at the core of White Fragility are part of their everyday lives. In this activity, students will unpack the concept of white fragility in a prominent Black poet’s work by finding examples, creating a collage or other visual representation, writing a dialog, and analyzing a vignette.

• Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race and racism in 21st century America. Rankine, a Black woman and academic, has been awarded numerous honors and fellowships, including from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts. Throughout Citizen, Rankine provides semi-autobiographical references to her experience of racial microaggressions, especially in academic and professional settings.
•  At this link, listen to Rankine read one such semi-autobiographical excerpt from Citizen that opens with a description of an inadvertent microaggression, from one of her (presumably white) colleagues. The poem is divided into 5 sections, each featuring a vignette. At the start of a series of vignettes, she writes:

“You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.”

• In Citizen, Rankine defies genre and categorization by embracing many types of media. Continue this practice by looking for moments of “white fragility” in this excerpt.
• Choose one section to recreate visually by drawing and/or making a collage that recreates the world in which the scene takes place as clearly as possible. Include details that convey information such as what time of day it is and who else is present besides the speaker(s).
• Choose another vignette and write an extended dialogue between individuals present in the stanza.
• Choose yet another vignette and perform a line-by-line analysis of the stanza, circling words and concepts that are especially meaningful to the themes of Discomfort as Trigger and Racist Socialization.
• Discuss what you’ve learned from your reactions to Rankine’s work in small groups (3-5 students per group). Compare and contrast the ways in which you imagined the different sections of the poem, and discuss the stanzas that shed new light on DiAngelo’s concept of “white fragility” and/or “nice racism.”

Teaching Suggestion: To get the students into the spirit of Rankine’s “mixed-media,” have them read this piece from Write or Die Tribe, entitled “Writers Who Inspire Us: The Mixed-Media Storytelling of Claudia Rankine.”

Paired Text Extension:

If students are inspired by the work of Claudia Rankine, you may want to encourage them to read Citizen in full. In Citizen, Rankine grapples with the idea that since the election of Obama, America has become a “post-racial” society. Citizen points to events such as the murder of Trayvon Martin, the case surrounding Jena Six, and the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina to show that racism persists.

• Citizen on SuperSummary