"Fear of being one of The Bad Ones" and "seeing The Bad Ones as The Other" are also an engine that maintains black-and-white morality for a person. Both maintain that morality and ethics aren't just things cleanly failed. They also suggest one must be detached from humanity in some fundamental way to fail.
In tandem, this is self-protective and learned helplessness for the thinker. And where white fragility is concerned, the order of operations goes something like this:
You are a Good Person. This makes you immune to perpetuating racism because you're not A Racist – thus, you're not a Bad Person.
For somebody to suggest you are enacting racism, then, is an attack on both your person and your personhood.
But a Bad Person cannot or will not feel remorse for their badness. So your fear and defensiveness over input is proof you are a Good Person.
Should you accept you've done a bad thing, your priority is then to stop being a Bad Person. Where you say "you're doing the work", what happens is public self-flagellation.
The behavior is not addressed. Re-earning your imagined Good Person status is the same as not perpetuating racism, afterall.
If you're not granted the safety of your Good Person status, helplessness sets in. Being a Bad Person is just what you are.
The anxiety and guilt are thus all that's left. "Redemption" seems unreachable because you're so far gone when in reality, redemption was never part of it.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle.
Interesting-but-important side note: this all also only works if you think of things like bigotry or abusiveness as discreet events. They aren't. These are patterns of behaviors. Like, abusers and their victims struggle to call it what it is because "they're not always like that!". "I'm-not-racist-but" white folks balk when told they're being racist. What all of these people miss is that nobody is one thing all the time. Cops have friends, fascists have families, and billionaires have hobbies.
Every fucking one of us contains multitudes, and morality is muddy. You need to internalize that both for your sake, and the sake of others.
origamiaround
titsay
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
