I have been lurking and reading the comments about the ongoing Eklof controversy but I made a reddit account to because I feel so strongly that the way people are deploying the notion of "white fragility" is a form of psychological abuse. I think there are conceptual problems with the concept as it is described by DiAngelo in the book, but I am especially troubled by how it is used by UUs as a way of putting down other people and as a thought-terminating cliche.

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Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence.

(From Beacon's summary)

This is essentially saying that if a white person experiences any kind of emotion that isn't immediate acceptance, or says something, or doesn't say something, that they are demonstrating white-supremacy. I think this contains within it the assumption that white people are always automatically wrong, and that it is impossible that there could be any other dynamic going on. Maybe there is just a simple misunderstanding.

But the bigger issue here is that this really looks like it is about invalidating a person's feelings. Saying "oh, that's white fragility" seems to mean "your feelings don't matter." That's psychological abuse, not anti-racist education.

These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue.

I don't think she's wrong, but I also think that invalidating people's feelings by saying the emotion that they are currently experiencing is actually just white fragility and not whatever else they may be feeling is also going to prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. If people are afraid of being accused of aid and abetting white supremacy or being fragile anytime they try to speak their truth, it isn't hard to imagine that people will become oppositional.

I anticipate that people will claim this is simply my own white fragility or something like that. I don't really think so. But I have gone to enough therapy to know that I have not really said anything here that I ought to be ashamed of.