A “diversity expert” gamely attempted to explain exactly why “white fragility” is so problematic in a YouTube video posted on Monday.
“Reducing the reductionism”: Komal Bhasin, a self-described “equity, diversity, and inclusion expert” based in Toronto, talks for more than two minutes about white people’s defensiveness when confronted with their allegedly congenital racism.
Bhasin starts the video — entitled “How White Fragility Leads to Social Control” — by saying that incorrectly using the “antiracist” buzzword “white fragility” is itself a form of white fragility.
- “Reducing the reductionism that takes place regarding the term of white supremacy, which is an all-encompassing, very profound notion of whiteness being superior or a gold standard to everything else, the denominator to the rest of us as the numerators, and how that has been distilled down and reduced down to mean such a small single thing that it can no longer be applied to describe things that everyone is experiencing,” Bhasin says.
- “So, narrowing down a conceptual idea so it can’t even be applied to explain and describe an experience of structure, coopting that term, is a very good example of how white fragility, because, um, white fragility is a byproduct of white supremacy, um, leads, it uh, leads to social control. Like, if you don’t have the termino — if you cannot with confidence apply the correct term to what is taking place because people can’t handle the use of that term, then that is an act of, uh, ideological subversion that prevents people from being able to apply a term, that prevents people from being authentically able to describe the experience that they’re having.”
With that out of the way, Bhasin — a daughter of Indian immigrants — gets brutally personal about how white fragility negatively impacts people like her.
- “And what I would say is the reason why white fragility, um, in a nutshell, um, reinforces social structures that are inequitable towards BIPOC is because it renders the avenues that we would take to speak up to leverage, um, to organize, to have the control, to use what we do have by way of power to change things, it renders those avenues, um, difficult to access because we’re afraid of the reactions that we look at from white people,” she says.
“BIPOC,” meaning “black, Indigenous and people of color,” briefly arose this summer as the preferred alternative to “people of color” because it better “centered” the oppression of black and indigenous people in the United States.
- However, the acronym quickly fell out of favor for still “erasing” differences between the enumerated identity groups and being too U.S.-centric.
- We’ll Do It Live reached out to Bhasin to ask why she’s still using “problematic” nomenclature but has yet to hear back.
“How white America needs to think”: The concept of white fragility, for its part, has stayed relevant amid the intellectual ferment and racial upheaval on the American left.
Famed antiracism trainer Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book, “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” was the No. 1 New York Times bestselling paperback nonfiction book after 111 weeks on the list.
- The book has retained its appeal despite being pilloried from both the left and the right as a particularly insipid and reductive articulation of “critical race theory,” an ascendant ideology of oppression.
- In a July review for The Atlantic, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter wrote: “‘White Fragility’ is, in the end, a book about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves. DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think — or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.”
Like DiAngelo, Bhasin has faced backlash for her explication of white fragility — though without any of the attendant success.
Her YouTube video has been viewed just a few dozen times and received one comment: “You are the reason civilizations collapse from within.”
Mythinformed, a group dedicated to promoting “viewpoint diversity,” took notice of the video and on Wednesday posted an excerpt to Twitter, where it has been viewed more than 16,000 times.
- “Watching a ‘White Fragility’ cult member breakdown the ideology has to be similar to watching L Ron Hubbard try to explain Xenu,” reads the caption, referring to the founder and mythos of the Church of Scientology.
In a followup tweet, the Mythinformed account noted that Bhasin’s sister, life coach Ritu Bhasin, is offering a workshop on how to “Thrive at Work as a BIPOC Professional,” with tickets going for $395 each.
- For a free preview of her insights, check out the rest of the “Let’s Talk About… White Fragility” video series on her YouTube page.
